Court Orders Facebook To Comply With Subpoena For Data On All Users That Broke “Covid-19 Misinformation” Rules

If you’re tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The District of Columbia (DC) Court of Appeals has rejected Meta’s appeal to quash a sweeping subpoena that demanded it hand over “documents sufficient to identify all Facebook groups, pages, and accounts that have violated Facebook’s COVID-19 misinformation policy with respect to content concerning vaccines” to the DC government. Millions of users, many of whom made truthful statements that challenged the government’s Covid narrative, are likely to be swept up in this government data grab due to the scope of Facebook’s “Covid-19 misinformation” rules and the number of users that were impacted by them. Facebook’s Covid-19 misinformation rules prohibited many truthful statements during the pandemic. For example, at one point claiming that “vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against” was banned — an assertion that health officials have now reluctantly admitted is true. Even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that Facebook censored truthful information. And millions of people were impacted by these far-reaching censorship rules. In some quarters, Facebook censored over 100 million posts for violating these rules. Some of the groups Facebook took down under these rules also had hundreds of thousands of users. Meta had challenged the subpoena on free speech and privacy grounds, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and that a warrant was required to compel disclosure of the requested data. Specifically, Meta argued that the subpoena violated Meta’s own First…Court Orders Facebook To Comply With Subpoena For Data On All Users That Broke “Covid-19 Misinformation” Rules