The Twitter Files: The White House Bullied Twitter Into Suppressing Accurate Information On Covid and Vaccines
Now THESE are the Twitter files I’VE been waiting to see: The Covid communications.
The latest trove of internal Twitter communiques show that both the Trump and Biden administrations bullied Twitter and other social media platforms to amplify government positions on the pandemic and quash information - even when it was accurate - that ran counter to the party line.
It constitutes a serious First Amendment violation by the feds.
The collaboration of big tech and government is a revolting revelation. Many of us suspected this was going on, but it was unconfirmed. Until now. In fact, we were ridiculed for suggesting that the American public was being spoon-fed a government-approved version of Covid-19, one that had catastrophic results for the economy and more seriously, on the education of American school children.
This unholy alliance between the White House and Twitter resulted in the widespread pandemic of mental illness and paranoia about Covid that remains among large swaths of the obedient public who are terrified to return to normal life.
How many people died because of this coordinated effort to block any meaningful debate on Covid? We will never know.
Nevertheless, watch the corporate media shrug or completely ignore this blockbuster story.
Fortunately, independent journalist David Zweig, reporting for The Free Press, studied the new releases. Those memos showed that Twitter execs were pressured by government agents to suspend the social media accounts of vaccine skeptics such as former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson and to suppress and discredit information from respected medical experts such as Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a member of the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and a former member of the Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the CDC.
Berenson was suspended by Twitter until recently.
Kulldorff was shadow-banned. That is, the ability to retweet or like his Tweets was blocked by Twitter and a warning was placed on some of his messages. A chilling practice reminiscent of government-controlled media in totalitarian societies.
In a piece headlined, “How Twitter Rigged The Covid Debate,” Zwieg lays out a compelling case against both the U.S. government and Twitter.
Zweig reports that the Trump administration was mostly concerned with covering up the panicked buying that was happening in supermarkets - anyone else remember the toilet paper shortages of 2020? - while the Biden administration tried to suppress accurate scientific information and debate that ran counter to information coming from official sources such as the CDC.
The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic. Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.
At the onset of the pandemic, the Trump administration was especially concerned about panic buying, and sought “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation,” according to emails sent by Twitter employees in the wake of meetings with the White House. One area of so-called misinformation: “runs on grocery stores.” The trouble is that it wasn't misinformation: There actually were runs on goods…
When the Biden administration took over, its agenda for the American people can be summed up as: Be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe.
Berenson, author of “Pandemia” and a Covid vaccine skeptic, bore the brunt of the Biden administration’s ire.
By the summer of 2021… Biden announced publicly that social media companies were “killing people” by allowing misinformation about vaccines. Just hours later, Twitter locked Berenson out of his account, and then permanently suspended him the next month. Berenson sued Twitter. He ultimately settled with the company, and is now back on the platform. As part of the lawsuit, Twitter was compelled to provide certain internal communications. They revealed that the White House had directly met with Twitter employees and pressured them to take action on Berenson.
Read that last sentence again. The White House met with Twitter employees and pressured them to take action on Berenson.
I don’t care where you are politically, that statement ought to horrify you.
Presidential meddling of this sort should constitute an impeachable offense, if Kamala Harris wasn’t waiting in the wings, that is. She’s Biden’s insurance policy.
It didn’t stop there. The Biden administration pressured Twitter to stop disseminating information from public health experts who deviated from the party line.
But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. As a result, legitimate findings and questions about our Covid policies and their consequences went missing.
1. THREAD:
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
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*
What is it called when government and the media collaborate and coordinate the dissemination of information? I know there’s a word for it.
Oh, that’s right. It’s fascism.
If you aren't pissed off about this, you don't care about free speech.
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) December 26, 2022
The President. Told his staff. To tell Twitter. To ban his critics.
This is worse than anything Trump ever did, or Obama, or Bush, or literally any president since the Espionage Act of 1917.
