The Twitter Files: Part 11 – How Twitter Rigged The COVID Debate
New Twitter files allege platform suppressed medical opinions, information on COVID
WASHINGTON (TND) — Journalist David Zweig started a new chapter in the “Twitter Files” saga Monday with a thread of tweets examining the social media platforms’ alleged errors in trying to curb the spread of misinformation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Zweig reported the story in conjunction with The Free Press, the right-of-center media company founded by ousted New York Times editor (and fellow “Twitter Files” writer) Bari Weiss.
This thread shifts the focus on the “Twitter Files” – a series of information drops of previously private and internal communications from the company made available to a select group by owner Elon Musk – from its recent series hurling allegations of wrongdoing and censorship collusion between Twitter and the FBI, as well as the federal law enforcement and intelligence communities writ large. Previous entries included a trilogy diving into discussions at Twitter in the lead up to the ban on former President Trump’s account in the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as well as Twitter’s handling of the New York Post’s article on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Zweig divided his narrative into two parts Monday: the first focusing on alleged pressure from the Biden White House on Twitter to moderate or ban certain “anti-vaxxer” accounts; the second breaks down how the social media platform moderated content from voices that sought to disrupt the established wisdom on pandemic response.
“In the summer of 2021, President Biden said social media companies were ‘killing people’ for allowing vaccine misinformation,” writes Zweig in a tweet. “Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month.” He notes that Berenson then sued Twitter, during which legal process internal documents revealed that the White House had asked company officials about kicking him off the platform. “They had only one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off the platform,” wrote a Twitter employee in a Slack channel. “Otherwise their questions were pointed but fair.” Zweig then points out that Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, wrote in a summary of White House meetings with the White House during December 2022, members of the Biden team were “very angry in nature” as they were dissatisfied with the company’s handling of and lack of action on several accounts.
This point has been a common thread in the “Twitter Files,” between authors like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and now, Zweig, as The National Desk has previously reported. They frequently cite instances of government requests, especially ones that come from a place of frustration, as examples of overreach or censorship by the government and therefore major proof of wrongdoing and possible violations of the First Amendment. What the “Twitter Files” fails to contextualize in those claims is that Twitter never had to follow the FBI or Biden White House’s requests for moderation, nor do users on their platform have a right to say whatever they want. As a private company, Twitter is not bound by free speech and does not have to continue to allow voices and statements that it finds violate its policies.
Zweig then expands this argument of alleged overreach by Twitter when it comes to COVID by looking at how the social media platform handled moderating contents and accounts that challenged the recommended guidelines for dealing with the novel coronavirus as laid out by the Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization and others.
He starts by breaking down the – very potentially real – problems with Twitter’s strategy, which lied in the strategy – and its implementation – itself. “There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process,” wrote Zweig. “First, much of the content moderation was conducted by bots, trained on machine learning and AI – impressive in their engineering, yet still too crude for such nuanced work.”
On the note of nuance, he follows up with the second broad area of failure. This revolved around the company hiring contractors in locations like the Philippines who did not have the proper training to handle the science-heavy tweets around COVID. “They were given decision trees to aid in the process, but tasking non experts to adjudicate tweets on complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacy data was destined for a significant error rate,” he reports.
While those kinds of missteps could definitely lead to botched attempts to moderate content in a balanced and fair way, Zweig continues by alleging that the personal outlooks and opinions of Twitter’s employees, which bent towards “establishment dogmas,” informed the AI and the final decisions that led to purported censorship. “The buck stopped with higher level employees at Twitter who chose the inputs for the bots and decision trees, and subjectively decided escalated cases and suspensions. As it is with all people and institutions, there was individual and collective bias.”
Zweig then cites examples from a handful specific accounts where he claims the social media company went out of its way to censor “legitimate” information, data and expert opinions on COVID-19 that deviated from the norm of the global medical community.
He leads off with the case of Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Swedish-born biostatistician who was then a professor of medicine at Harvard’s Medical School. Kulldorff co-authored the “Great Barrington Declaration” with three other medical professors, advocating for an end to lockdowns and a herd immunity approach to addressing COVID-19. One of Kulldorff’s tweets from March 2021, saying those with prior infection and children do not need to be vaccinated, was flagged with a label calling the information “misleading.” He was banned the next month.
Zweig alleges that this was overstep by Twitter as Kulldorff was offering an “expert opinion” on COVID strategy shared by “numerous other countries” – though he fails to cite a single country with that outlook. However, experts agree that the protection from natural antibodies gained as a result of COVID infection do not last indefinitely (granted neither do vaccines, hence why booster shots are needed), which is concerning for his lassiez-faire attitude towards immunization.
Furthermore, the “Great Barrington Declaration” he co-authored was immediately decried in the highest terms across the medical community. “Not only is there no proof of lasting immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection, but the strategy would place an unacceptable burden on healthcare workers, as well as the economy,” wrote Dr. Deepti Gurdasani of Queen Mary University of London, in an open letter signed by 80 medical researchers to The Lancet, one of the most prestigious academic journals in the world.
The head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that strategies like those Kulldorf advocated for are “scientifically and ethically problematic.” “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic,” he said in a press briefing a week after the declaration was published.
Zweig then cites the tweets of a “self-proclaimed public health fact checker” with 18,000 followers that were also flagged as misinformation. The fact checker admits on her website that she had just started to keep track of COVID data in May 2020 and that she does not have any formal training in epidemiology.
The last major example he cites is when Twitter labeled a tweet by physician Euzebiusz Jamrozik as “misinformation.” Jamrozik shared a graph from a 2022 study that tracks the number of cardiac arrests among participants in the study (ages 16-39) following their receipt of a COVID mRNA vaccine. While Zweig alleges this as wrongdoing because a physician was sharing the results of a published study, he neglected to say that the study was about the under 40 population of Israel and the study furthermore stated that it did not establish “causal relationships between” vaccines and heart attacks.
In a follow-up tweet Monday, Musk said there was “Much more to The Twitter Files: Covid Editon than this introductory thread.” He promised a follow up piece coming next week to feature “leading doctors & researchers from Harvard, Stanford & other institutions.”
So it seems, the “Twitter Files” are winding up for 2022.
Twitter Files Part 11 shows how ‘PR crisis’ following 2016 election allowed company to embrace intel community
Matt Taibbi shared 2023’s first batch of “Twitter Files”
Twitter files allege ‘very angry’ Biden team targeted journalists over COVID tweets: Howard Kurtz
‘Media Buzz’ host Howard Kurtz discusses the latest batch of Twitter files that reveal the Biden and Trump administrations attempted to suppress COVID content they did not agree with.
The first “Twitter Files” of 2023 dove into the tech giant’s evolution from its resistance to its embrace of the intel community.
In the eleventh installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” Substack writer Matt Taibbi reported about the “PR crisis” Twitter underwent in 2017 when Democrats pummeled the tech giant for its apparent inaction of investigating Russian influence on the platform as Facebook was public with uprooting suspicious foreign accounts following the 2016 presidential election.
Amid pressure, Twitter launched a “Russia Task Force” to investigate whether the Kremlin had such a foothold on the platform, even after it had suspended several suspected Russia-linked accounts.
“First round of RU investigation… 15 high risk accounts, 3 of which have connections with Russia, although 2 are RT,” an October 2017 memo shared by Taibbi read at the time.
Another read, “Finished with investigation… 2500 full manual account reviews, we think this is exhaustive… 32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia, only 2 of those have significant spend one of which is Russia Today…remaining <$10k in spend.”
Taibbi cited a report from BuzzFeed News that had flagged 45 “fake propaganda accounts” to Twitter, which were later suspended, and “leaks” from Congress published in the media and proposed legislation from lawmakers that further pressured the tech giant to take action.
“This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement,” Taibbi wrote Tuesday.
He then highlighted the discrepancy between Twitter’s “external” policy, which was that it would remove content “in our soul discretion,” while its “internal guidance” read that “any user identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber operations against targets associated with U.S. or other elections… shall not be allowed to advertise on Twitter.”
“We will not be reverting to the status quo,” Twitter’s then-Public Policy VP Colin Crowell told his colleagues at the time.
Each installment of the “Twitter Files” was shared by the journalists in lengthy Twitter threads addressing various controversies. Taibbi went viral with the first installment in early December with his “Twitter Files” focusing on Twitter’s internal discussions leading to it censor the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election, with some officials struggling to explain how it violated its “hacked materials” policies.
It was later revealed that the first batch of “Twitter Files” was vetted without Musk’s knowledge by Twitter deputy general counsel Jim Baker, who previously served as the FBI’s general counsel and was involved in the Russia probe. Musk fired Baker shortly thereafter.
Baker was swept up Taibbi’s reporting about the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, telling his colleagues at the time, “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked” but added, “it’s reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted.”
Additionally, Taibbi initially reported, “Although several sources recalled hearing about a ‘general’ warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story.” It is unclear whether Baker’s involvement in vetting the “Twitter Files” led Taibbi to draw that conclusion and whether Baker omitted files that would have shown the federal government intervening in Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Jim Baker was fired by Elon Musk as Twitter’s deputy general counsel after revelations that he had vetted the first batch of the Twitter Files without Musk’s knowledge. (Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)
The second installment published by The Free Press editor Bari Weiss revealed Twitter’s “blacklisting” of prominent conservatives, including Fox News host Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, as well as Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a longstanding opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns.
Internal communications also reveal Twitter staffers admitting that the popular right-wing account Libs of TikTok never violated its “hateful conduct” policy despite being punished several times for allegedly doing so.
Those revelations appear to contradict what former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress in 2018, when he testified under oath that Twitter did not censor or shadowban conservatives.
The third, fourth and fifth installments of the “Twitter Files” focused on the permanent suspension of former President Trump around the Capitol riot in January 2021.
Taibbi reported how Twitter circulated election-related tweets from various users leading up to the 2020 election that were “flagged” by the FBI as being problematic.
Independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss were tapped by Elon Musk to report on the “Twitter Files.” (Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage, Bari Weiss)
Independent writer Michael Shellenberger revealed that Dorsey was phoning it in as he was on vacation while his deputies were pushing to deplatform Trump, with Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth particularly spearheading efforts to censor other users pertaining to tweets about the 2020 election. It became known that Roth met on a weekly basis with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the office of the Director of National Inteligence in the weeks leading up to the election.
Weiss addressed the pressure Twitter management was facing from its employees who called for Trump’s permanent suspension, though the Free Press editor also revealed several Twitter staffers who enforce policies did not believe Trump’s tweets from Jan. 6 actually violated its rules.
However, it was Vijaya Gadde, then-Twitter’s head legal chief, who asked if Trump’s tweets could be “coded incitement to further violence.” Moments later, the so-called “scaled enforcement team” suggested that based on how Twitter interprets Trump’s tweets, it could violate the violence incitement policies.
Part six of the “Twitter Files” put a spotlight on Twitter’s close ties with the FBI. Taibbi alleged the law enforcement agency was acting like a “subsidiary” of the tech giant, revealing communications that showed FBI agents systemically flagged Twitter users for tweets that included “possible violative content” pertaining to the election.
In response to the “Twitter Files,” a spokesperson for the FBI told Fox News Digital, “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”
The FBI’s routine contact with Twitter regarding users that would ultimately face punishment for their tweets has raised major flags about potential First Amendment violations.
FBI headquarters building is seen in Washington, U.S. Pro-Russian hackers have claimed to have hacked the FBI website this week. (REUTERS/Yuri Gripas)
In part seven, Shellenberger framed the Twitter’s coziness with the FBI in the context of the Hunter Biden laptop story, showing the FBI’s requests for Twitter to share sensitive data of its users, which Twitter refused to give, and the agency’s repeated inquiries into whether Twitter has seen foreign activity leading up to the 2020 election, something Twitter at the time said it hadn’t. On Oct. 13, 2020, just one day before the New York Post broke its Hunter Biden story that was quickly censored, Twitter received ten unknown documents from the FBI through its secure one-way Teleport channel.
One email from February 2021 shows the FBI paid Twitter over $3.4 million since October 2019 over the course of their partnership, as Twitter’s policies seek reimbursements when it comes to producing information as part of a legal process.
Roth had even participated in what was dubbed the “Hack-and-Dump Working Group” with the Aspen Institute in September 2020 to elaborately simulate how the media and Big Tech should handle something like the Hunter Biden laptop.
The FBI remained defiant amid criticism, telling Fox News in a statement “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers… It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
The tenth batch of Twitter Files, this time reported by writer David Zweig, focused on COVID and the platform’s efforts to enforce its so-called “misinformation” policy, reporting “both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.” Zweig highlighted a memo written by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, who claimed the Biden team was “very angry” about Twitter not taking action to “de-platform” various accounts based on meetings with the White House. Musk teased there’s “much more” Twitter Files to reveal in 2023 particularly about COVID and how top doctors and scientists were “actively suppressed on Twitter,” presumably for going against the White House-approved narrative.
1. THREAD:
THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE
– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*
2. So far the Twitter Files have focused on evidence of Twitter’s secret blacklists; how the company functioned as a kind of subsidiary of the FBI; and how execs rewrote the platform’s rules to accommodate their own political desires.
3. What we have yet to cover is Covid. This reporting, for The Free Press,
@thefp
, is one piece of that important story.
4. The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.
5. Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for
@thefp
showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.
6. At the onset of the pandemic, according to meeting notes, the Trump admin was especially concerned about panic buying. They came looking for “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation” about “runs on grocery stores.” But . . . there were runs on grocery stores.
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.
28. Whether by humans or algorithms, content that was contrarian but true was still subject to getting flagged or suppressed This tweet was labeled “Misleading,” even though the owner of this account,
, a physician, was referring to the results of a published study
Latest ‘Twitter Files’ alleges rigged COVID debate
Tom Dempsey, Devan Markham
(NewsNation) — The tenth installment of the “Twitter Files” document dumps contains information alleging that the U.S. government was involved in COVID-19 content moderation on the social media service. The documents are part of Twitter owner Elon Musk’s effort to document how the company was run before he took over. Journalist David Zweig, who posted the new Twitter thread, accused the U.S. government under both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden of pressuring Twitter to elevate specific information about the coronavirus and suppress other content. Zweig described how Trump’s team remained concerned about panic buying during the onset of the pandemic and how they approached Twitter looking for “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation” about “runs on grocery stores.”
But there were runs on grocery stores, Zweig said. He argued that pressure continued to grow from the White House under the Biden administration and it allegedly tried to influence the platform to stop misinformation about the vaccine. “With COVID, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas,” Zweig tweeted.
Due to the alleged growing pressure, Zweig said Twitter used bots and overseas contractors to monitor content, believing this led to legitimate data being labeled as misinformation and other accounts being suspended for posting data or opinions that went against the government’s own narrative. Zweig used a Harvard Medical School epidemiologist as an example, saying that Dr. Martin Kulldorff’s tweet containing his “expert opinion” on vaccines was allegedly at odds with U.S. public health authorities and led to his tweet being labeled as “Misleading” by Twitter. In response, all replies and likes for the post were shut off by the social media giant.
“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,” Zweig tweeted. Toward the end of the thread, Zweig alleged tweets that differed from the government’s view were subject to moderation. “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. No matter whether such views were correct or adopted abroad,” Zweig tweeted.
He concluded the thread by questioning what it would have looked like if there was a more open debate on Twitter and other social media sites, possibly leading to a much different response to COVID-19, lockdowns and the risk to people and children.
The Twitter Files: Part 11 – How Twitter Rigged The COVID Debate
The latest Twitter Files investigative report has dropped, this time from author and journalist David Zweig. In this edition, Zweig unveils Twitter and the U.S. Government’s efforts to censor info that was true but inconvenient to government policy, discredit doctors and other experts who disagreed, and suppress ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s own data.
“The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19,” Zweig tweeted. “Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @thefp showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.”
Check out Zweig’s investigation below: