The latest dump of internal Twitter communications by Elon Musk has revealed that the government pressured the social media company to influence public conversation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Reporter David Zweig was given access to Twitter documents that he argues show the “debate” on COVID was “rigged” from the start.
In the opening tweet of a thread, Zweig claims that Twitter censored information that was “true but inconvenient to U.S. [government] policy,” discredited “doctors and other experts who disagreed” with those policies, and actively suppressed “ordinary users” whose content went against the preferred narrative.
Zweig’s investigation showed that this pressure campaign spanned both the Trump and Biden administrations.
Initially, the Trump administration sought Twitter’s assistance in calming so-called “panic buying” among the public, in which Americans were making runs on grocery stores and other retailers out of fear of scarcity during the initial lockdowns.
The internal Twitter documents reveal that the Trump administration also engaged Google, Facebook, and Microsoft in this effort, and all participated to some degree. The government and these companies had a standing weekly call and stayed in close communication for an indeterminate period of time.
When the Biden administration took over, the focus reportedly shifted to the conversation surrounding the efficacy and safety of the new COVID-19 vaccines.
The information Zweig shared reveals that the Biden administration went as far as to single out so-called “high-profile anti-vaxxer accounts.”
Among those identified by the Biden administration was Alex Berenson, a longtime outspoken critic of COVID policy and the mRNA vaccines.
According to Zweig, in the summer of 2021, President Biden proclaimed that social media companies were “killing people” for their tolerance of so-called “vaccine misinformation.”
Within hours of Biden’s statement, Berenson’s account was suspended, and he was later kicked off Twitter altogether.
The incident caused Berenson to sue Twitter, ending in a settlement between the two parties. The lawsuit also revealed documents that show the Biden administration’s apparent attempts to have Berenson de-platformed over his vaccine commentary.
In one conversation, a Twitter employee asked, “How was [the White House]?” Another responded, “Overall, pretty good! They had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”
Other communications reveal that the Biden administration was “very angry” that Twitter had not been “more aggressive in de-platforming multiple accounts” that promoted content counter to their narrative on COVID and its vaccines.
Zweig also found that medical experts, such as Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, were punished by Twitter if their opinions veered from U.S. government preferences.
In one tweet, Kulldorff tweeted that only high-risk individuals and their caretakers should pursue vaccination and that children and those with prior infection of COVID should not.
Twitter labeled this a “misleading” tweet.
Another individual, Andrew Bostom, a medical doctor, was permanently suspended after receiving multiple “strikes for misinformation” on COVID policy and vaccines.
One of his strikes was quoting the results of a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines. A later review of the five strikes against Bostom revealed that only one tweet actually violated Twitter’s stated policies.
Bostom had shared data on the likelihood of death in children from influenza versus COVID, as well as the likelihood of death from the COVID vaccine in children versus the influenza vaccine.
