Twitter cooperated with the Trump and Biden administrations to shut down content about Covid-19 that conflicted with the official line coming from the White House and myriad federal agencies.
Reported by David Zweig, whose work appears in the leftist Atlantic and New York Times, the latest from the Twitter Files shows that it censored China Virus experts who contradicted government propaganda.
One target of censorship was an expert from Harvard. Another cited official data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Thus did Twitter become a source of real misinformation and disinformation itself.
So evidence continues to accumulate that the federal government trespassed the First Amendment when, as a practical matter, it ordered Twitter to shut down content that federal bureaucrats deemed “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
No Dissent
“The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19,” Zweig reported.
Though the Trump administration worried about accounts that might start panic buying and runs on stores, a genuine concern, Biden and his nefarious subalterns worried about information that didn’t follow the party line.
“When the Biden admin took over, one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on Covid. The focus was on ‘anti-vaxxer accounts.’ Especially Alex Berenson.”
Biden caused Berenson’s suspension, Zweig suggested:
In the summer of 2021, president Biden said social media companies were “killing people” [by] allowing vaccine misinformation. Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month.
Berenson sued (and then settled with) Twitter. In the legal process Twitter was compelled to release certain internal communications, which showed direct White House pressure on the company to take action on Berenson.
Berenson prevailed in a lawsuit against the leftist social media giant, but in any event the “Biden team was ‘very angry’ that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts,” an internal message says. “They wanted Twitter to do more.”
“Do more” … meaning censor more to shut down contrarians.
Though Twitter didn’t surrender to all of Biden’s unconstitutional demands, it “did suppress views — many from doctors and scientific experts — that conflicted with the official positions of the White House,” Zweig continued:
As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.…
With Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas.
Inevitably, dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information.
Harvard Expert Silenced
One victim of the censorship campaign was Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard University.
He committed WrongThink when he “tweeted views at odds with US public health authorities and the American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter,” Zweig reported:
Internal emails show an “intent to action” by a moderator, saying Kulldorff’s tweet violated the company’s Covid-19 misinformation policy and claimed he shared “false information.”
But Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion — one which also happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines.
After Twitter took action, Kulldorff’s tweet was slapped with a “Misleading” label and all replies and likes were shut off, throttling the tweet’s ability to be seen and shared by many people, the ostensible core function of the platform.
Zweig discovered countless cases of leftist Twitter personnel who censored accounts as “misleading” because they didn’t, for instance, toe the CDC line. Worse still, Twitter censored even when someone cited CDC’s own data:
A tweet by @KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker, with 18K followers, was flagged as “Misleading,” and replies and likes disabled, even though it displayed the CDC’s *own data.*…
Tellingly, the tweet by @KelleyKga that was labeled “Misleading” was a reply to a tweet that contained actual misinformation.
Covid has never been the leading cause of death from disease in children. Yet that tweet remains on the platform, and without a “misleading” label.
Twitter cracked down on a doctor in Rhode Island for citing a peer-reviewed study.
Another victim was mRNA vaccine pioneer Robert Malone, who warned against vaccinating young adults and kids. The virus doesn’t often kill them.
Then again, and to his credit, hate-Trump homosexual Yoel Roth defended a tweet from POTUS 45 when he left Walter Reed military hospital after a bout with the Asiatic pathogen. Trump tweeted that Americans should neither fear the virus nor let it control them.
“In a surreal exchange, Jim Baker, at the time Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, asks why telling people to not be afraid wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policy,” Zweig reported:
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety, had to explain that optimism wasn’t misinformation.
Yet Twitter decided not only that nothing must interfere with the official government narrative, but also that “information that challenged that view, such as showing harms of vaccines, or that could be perceived as downplaying the risks of Covid, especially to children, was subject to moderation, and even suppression,” Zweig concluded. “No matter whether such views were correct or adopted abroad.”
In other words, even when information contrary to the narrative was correct, Twitter censored it.
First Amendment lawsuits against the Biden administration and its myriad agencies can now begin.
