In the most recent installment of the Twitter files, New York-based reporter David Zweig detailed how the US government pressured the social media platform to silence and suppress users who spread information about COVID that contradicted the establishment’s narrative.
Zweig claims that Twitter helped rig the COVID debate by “censoring information that was true but inconvenient to US government policy,” “discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed,” and “suppressing ordinary users, including some who shared the CDC’s own data.”
According to internal Twitter files, the US government requested that the social media site elevate COVID content that supported its position on vaccine efficacy while suppressing dissenting information.
According to meeting notes, Trump’s former chief technology officer, Michael Kratsios, requested assistance from Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft to “combat misinformation” on specific topics such as “conspiracies around 5G cell towers, runs on grocery stores, and misinformation that could stoke panic buying and behaviors.”
Soon after the Biden administration took office, officials asked Twitter for a meeting to discuss the suppression of “high-profile anti-vaxxer accounts.”
The Biden administration did not believe Twitter was doing enough to suppress dissenting views, according to Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s head of US public policy.
“The Biden team was dissatisfied with Twitter’s enforcement strategy and wanted the company to do more to deplatform several accounts. We were asked to participate in several other calls as a result of our dissatisfaction. They were very angry people “According to Culbertson.
Twitter’s methods of suppressing information, according to Zweig, were flawed for several reasons, including the use of AI bots that were “too crude for such nuanced work.” Twitter also hired outside contractors to moderate content and gave them a simple decision tree to use to determine whether posts violated platform rules.
Internal Twitter files eventually revealed that higher-level employees had a collective bias “toward establishment dogmas,” according to Zweig.
Because of these biases, posts that differed from the CDC’s position on COVID and vaccine efficacy, including content posted by doctors and scientific experts, were removed.
Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, for example, stated on Twitter that he does not believe everyone should be vaccinated. As a result, the social media platform declared that his comment violated its misinformation policy. As a result, the tweet was labeled “misleading,” and the ability to like and respond to the post was disabled.
“What might this pandemic and its aftermath have looked like if there had been a more open debate on Twitter and other social media platforms—let alone the mainstream press—about the origins of Covid, lockdowns, the true risks of Covid in children, and much more?” Zweig took note.
