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Without warning, Facebook on Wednesday de-platformed (unpublished) the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) account. Simultaneously, Instagram suspended CHD’s Instagram account.
Each of these accounts had hundreds of thousands of followers.
CHD received the following notifications from both platforms:
Commenting on the move, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD chairman and chief legal counsel, said:
“Facebook is acting here as a surrogate for the federal government’s crusade to silence all criticism of draconian government policies. Our constitutional framers recognized this peril of government censorship.
“We don’t need the First Amendment to protect popular or government-approved speech. They incorporated the First Amendment specifically to protect free expression of dissenting opinions. They understood that a government that can silence its critics has a license for every atrocity.”
The de-platforming by Facebook and Instagram dovetails with CHD’s lawsuit against Instagram and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, filed in August 2020.
In an appeal filed July 29 in the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, CHD provided the court with documents, produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which the CDC provided to Facebook outlining what the CDC defined as “misinformation.”
Titled “COVID Vaccine Misinformation: Hot Topics,” the documents advised tech giants to “be on the lookout” for various topics the CDC considers to be misinformation including COVID-19 vaccine shedding, VAERS reports, spike protein data and more.
Roger Teich, CHD legal counsel for the Meta lawsuit, said, “Censorship is not only unconstitutional, it’s un-American.”
CHD’s lawsuit, one of the organization’s 50+ active lawsuits to defend freedom of speech, medical freedom, truth, bodily autonomy and children’s health, is pending a 9th Circuit decision.
The tech giants de-platformed CHD just days after the CDC issued new guidance loosening COVID-19 policies.
And within hours of the CHD being de-platformed, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky outlined plans for overhauling how the agency works while admitting the agency’s response to COVID-19 was flawed and the agency committed a number of missteps in its management of the pandemic.
