ANTHONY FAUCI, THE federal government’s most prominent authority on COVID-19, had his final White House press conference two days before Thanksgiving 2022. The event served as a send-off for the longserving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was finally stepping down after nearly four decades on the job.
Ashish Jha, the Biden administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, hailed Fauci as “the most important, consequential public servant in the United States in the last half century.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described him as a near-constant “source of information and facts” for all Americans throughout the pandemic.
Indeed, the U.S. public’s understanding of COVID-19—its virality, how to prevent its spread, and even where it comes from—was largely controlled by Fauci and bureaucrats like him, to a greater degree than most people realize. The federal government shaped the rules of online discussion in unprecedented and unnerving ways.
This has become much more obvious over the past few months, following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Musk granted several independent journalists access to internal messages between the government and the platform’s moderators, which demonstrate concerted efforts by various federal agencies—including the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and even the White House—to convince Twitter to restrict speech. These disclosures, which have become known as the Twitter Files, are eye-opening.
But Twitter was hardly the only object of federal pressure. According to a trove of confidential documents obtained by , health advisers at the CDC had significant input on pandemic-era social media policies at Facebook as well. They were consulted frequently, at times daily. They were actively involved in the affairs of content moderators, providing constant and ever-evolving guidance. They requested frequent updates about which topics were trending on the platforms, and they recommended what kinds of content should be deemed false or misleading. “Here are two issues we are seeing a great deal of misinfo on that we wanted to flag for you all,” reads one note from a
