WEAPONIZATION OF THE GOVERNMENT HEARING-3/30/23-REP THOMAS MASSIE-TWITTER AND FACEBOOK FED PRIVILEGE

I wanna ask you, Mr. Sour, how did the c d c, the Surgeon General and, and naad communicate with, uh, social media platforms to influence them? They
Did it in different ways, but you see a lot of email traffic that was not public at the time where there's censorship activities that were out of public view
In, um, like at C D C, where, what was the particular channel there? Did, uh, I heard that they had, uh, some portal partnership that they could access directly to Twitter. Who, who were the people involved?
That's correct. You see both Twitter and Facebook offering federal officials privilege access to be sort of privileged flaggers of misinformation using something that Twitter calls the partner support portal, and something that the Facebook emails describe as Facebook's Misin Info Reporting channel. And they assure them, Hey, if you go through this process, you'll get a, you know, very prompt responses will prioritize escalation of your concerns.
So the government literally signed up as a partner with the social media companies.
I think that's a very fair comment on our
Evidence. So one other avenue that the, um, I want you to tell us about that the government may have had influences this virality project. Can you tell us what that is and what they do and if they receive taxpayer money? The
Virality project is a kind of consortium of private entities working hand in glove with the federal government. It's really just an extension under a different name of the Election Integrity Partnership. You're talking about entities like Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington Center for an informed public, uh, graphica and the Atlantic Council's d FFR lab, collaborating closely with state, federal, and local government officials and collaborating closely with social media platforms all at once to engage in a, a mass surveillance and mass censorship program for social media.
The, the, the breadth of which is staggering.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that the virality project was targeting my communications in social media with my constituents, um, in June, they said Representative Massey uses Cleveland Clinic study to allege counter to CDC guidance that previously infected people do not need the vaccine. Uh, they were concerned that my Fox News interview had gone viral with 393,000 Facebook views among, and then finally they said whether or not this is a case in which scientific consensus is changing.
In other words, whether this is true or not, they said, uh, that natural immunity key narrative and is, is a source of uncertainty, not only among anti-vaccine activists, but also among the questioning and hesitant that uncertainty must be addressed by experts and openly and responsibly communicated to the public. Um, and, and this virality project working with the government was advising the social media companies on what to censor.
Is that correct?
That's correct. And that that's correct.
So here's what I find disturbing, not necessarily that my tweets were censored, but if this, this is one of the tweets, uh, where natural immunities, veteran vaccine immunity, there were multiple studies supporting that. It had subsequent tweet just like this, that referenced those studies. It got blocked. Two. But what concerns me is this statement down here, this tweet can't be replied to shared or liked. Okay. Shared. Are, are we, when we do this to constituents, are we squelching their First Amendment?
Absolutely. The night versus First Amendment Center, uh, uh, case that Mr. Suliman was talking about in the Second Circuit held that liking, commenting, reposting, retweeting, there's case law indicating these are First Amendment protected activities.
I think, I think it's appalling that the, we've got evidence that the First Amendment was violated by the executive branch, particularly people trying to redress their government, uh,