Leaked Twitter files reveal how the United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content related to Covid-19. Shared in a series of tweets by David Zweig – a New York-based independent journalist and writer, the files show how top-executives rewrote the platform’s rules to accommodate their own political desires.
“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,” Zweig writes in one of his tweets. He goes on to state that in the summer of 2021, president Joe Biden said social media companies were “killing people” for allowing vaccine misinformation.
The American writer was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month. Berenson, later 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, the files show.
Zweig says that it was not just Twitter that was attending meeting and facing pressure from the US government. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others, he writes.
One of this tweets show how a December 2022 summary of meetings with the White House by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, added new evidence of the White House’s pressure campaign. “Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was ‘very angry’ that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more,” he says.
Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. But the microblogging platfrom did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing, Zweig says in the posts.
Zweig’s report shows that Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard Medical School epidemiologist, tweeted views at odds with U.S. public-health authorities and the American Left. The 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.’ 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.
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