Big Tech colludes to suppress speech in more places than just the US, although evidence of those particular, US-centric incidents, as they become revealed, takes all the spotlight.
There are surely many countries where citizens will never know that something of the kind has happened to them – that is, getting censored online by major social media at a government’s behest – but we now do know that Canada is not among those. It’s well known.
Emails that just surfaced provide evidence that Facebook censored (at the very least) three posts because the Canadian health agency asked the company to do it.
The messages also show a Facebook eager to “improve” the way it and Health Canada work together to censor Canadians.
Health Canada finally had to provide the documents – two whole pages /s – no less than 11 months into being asked to release them. The documents concern the country’s government – specifically the Health Ministry – asking Facebook to remove “at least three” posts published by users.
Of course, this has to do with Covid. At this point, an alien visiting the Earth would think that there is and never has been, any other health issue of significance or urgency on this planet, ever.
But what’s interesting is that even as the pandemic became an “abandoned global crisis” – as others, of other kinds, were developing and taking up most of the government and media attention, and resources – as late as in June 2023, Health Canada was very reluctant to provide answers to MP Dan Albas questions about February 2021 Covid-related content censorship on Facebook.
The three known instances of censorship collusion that happened at that time concern the Canadian authorities asking Facebook to “remove users’ posts for ‘disinformation about lifting a COVID restriction’,” RebelNews now writes.
According to the emails, Facebook was not taking any chances. The company comprehensively reviled and likely smeared in the wake of the 2016 US election as some kind of a “helper” to the phantom “meddlers” eventually became as eager as it could be, to oblige. Anything.
“I wanted to quickly follow up to confirm that we’ve removed the posts you’ve flagged and we have added this to our list of false claims so we should be able to detect and remove in the future,” was Facebook’s response to an email from Chief of Social Media, Digital Communications Division at Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada Maja Graham.
And what a “list” that must be – imagine all the censorship keywords Facebook appears to have been compiling and implementing for years.
