According to the latest version of the “Twitter files,” the Biden White House pressured Twitter to “elevate” and “repress” users based on their stance on COVID-19, ultimately resulting in a “truth but policy We will censor information that is inconvenient to the planners,” he said Monday.
The campaign of coercion during the pandemic began with the Trump administration. The Trump administration asked Twitter to crack down on articles about panic buying and “grocery store runs” in the early days of the epidemic, but stepped up under Biden, the administration’s focus. Removal of “anti-vaxxer accounts”, according to The Free Press’s David Zweig.
For example, in June 2021, hours after Biden publicly ranted that social media companies were “killing people” for allowing disinformation about vaccines to spread, the former New York Times reporter and vaccine The suspected person, Alex Berenson, was suspended from the site and eventually banned.
Berenson sued Twitter, forcing it to release internal communications showing that the White House pressured the company to shut down his account.
In an April 2021 Slack message, an unidentified Twitter employee said the admins “asked one very tough question as to why Alex Berenson wasn’t kicked off the platform.”
“Infection cannot be prevented. Or transmitted. Don’t think of it as a vaccine,” Berenson tweeted.
“At best, think of it as a therapeutic drug with limited efficacy and a horrific side effect profile that must be administered before you get sick,” he wrote.
According to Zweig, Twitter’s head of U.S. public policy Lauren Culbertson elaborated on the White House’s pressure campaign in a series of meetings earlier this month.
In the memo, Culbertson said the administration was “extremely upset” that Twitter had not taken more aggressive action to silence its vaccine critics and urged the company to do more. said he hoped, the file showed.
Among the users Twitter cracked down on was Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, who tweeted in March 2021 that “people who were previously naturally infected do not need the COVID-19 vaccine.” .[n]Also [do] Children. ”
Kuldorf’s tweet was flagged as “misleading” by the site, Zweig wrote, even though it was in line with vaccine policies in “many other countries.”
Another doctor, Andrew Bostom, of Rhode Island, was permanently suspended after tweeting the results of negative studies on vaccines and highlighting data that the coronavirus is less dangerous to children than the flu. I was. A story about children’s flu and Covid risk.
Bostom’s account was reinstated on Christmas morning.
“thanks to @davidzweig to expose the grotesque injustice of @twitterMany account suspensions, including my own, are due to suspicion of a new type of “misinformation” in which evidence-based data refutes a distorted but “accepted” narrative.
According to Zweig’s research, much of Twitter’s moderation of COVID content is due to bots that are “too crude for such sensitive work” and Filipinos whose non-medical expertise has led to “significant error rates.” Turns out it was done by a contractor in a place like that.
“Personal and collective bias” also plagued high-level Twitter employees who were responsible for overseeing the process, “subjectively” escalating cases and suspending users, Zweig said. discovered.
When former President Donald Trump told his followers in October 2020, “I feel really good!” After receiving COVID-19 treatment at Walter Reed Medical Center, the former FBI general counsel, who urged his supporters not to fear the virus or “let it rule your life,” tweeted Twitter’s top Why wasn’t the message flagged to the company’s then-watchdogs, James Baker, the person in charge.
“Why is this POTUS tweet not violating COVID-19 policy? We asked Yoel Roth, head of trust, and Stacia Cardille, chief legal officer.
Ross, who resigned last month in the midst of Elon Musk’s November acquisition, responded to Baker that the optimism was not misinformation.
“We are not inciting people to do anything harmful, nor are we advising them to take precautions or follow mask instructions (or other guidelines),” he replied.
The latest revelations are that earlier “Twitter files” found that the FBI and CIA meddled in social media companies, and weeks before the 2020 election, Hunter alleged that Biden was using his father’s name to go overseas. secured questionable business arrangements in