This week, Twitter received a lot of criticism for its decision to block a tweet from a former Harvard scientist on his opinion of the COVID-19 vaccine. This instance is only one of dozens that have occurred over the previous year as authorities tried to control information about pandemics. The tech tycoon Elon Musk’s support of “Twitter Files” was a major factor in the story’s publicization.
Internal emails obtained by journalist David Zweig reveal that there were “countless instances” of Twitter messages being deleted or classified as “misleading” because they deviated from COVID-19 or vaccine-related CDC recommendations or “establishment views.”
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Internal emails reveal that a Twitter administrator once reported a message by former Harvard School of Medicine professor Martin Kulldorff as “false information” because it broke the social media company’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. In response, Twitter disabled all likes and responses, flagged his message as “misleading,” and otherwise stopped it from being disseminated extensively.
Rhode Island doctor Andrew Bostom was facing a lifetime ban after receiving many warnings for breaking Twitter’s rules of service. However, an internal assessment showed that just one strike was real, which prompted his attorney to get in touch with the social network company.
“One Bostom tweet found to still be in violation [of] cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children,” Zweig wrote. “That this tweet was not only flagged by a bot, but its violation manually affirmed by a staff member is telling of both the algorithmic and human bias at play. Bostom’s account was suspended for months and was finally restored on Christmas Day.
“The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about COVID-19.”
Zweig said that “one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on COVID” once the current government entered office in 2021. Internal communications reveal that “anti-vaxxer accounts” were the specific area of concentration.
According to reports, Twitter apparently refused to completely accede to the Biden administration’s demands.
“An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed employees often debating moderation cases in great detail, and with more care than was shown by the government toward free speech,” Zweig penned.
White House representatives met to consider using Twitter for political communication, according to Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s head of public policy. This sheds light on one method through which Twitter is increasing its engagement in US politics. “very angry” Twitter was advised to deplatform more accounts after complaints that the company hadn’t done so.
“But Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House,” The journalist wrote, but he offered no supporting details. “As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.”
Posts by Trump
Although many people were unaware, throughout his administration, Donald Trump’s tweets about the epidemic generated a lot of controversy and dispute among personnel. This suggests a degree of interpersonal conflict in the White House, according to Zweig’s reporting.
James Baker chided Yoel Roth, who was at the time Twitter’s director of security and safety, for failing to flag President Trump’s reassuring “don’t be frightened of COVID” post from October. Roth was a key player in the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. In response, Roth argued that a “optimistic statement” this upbeat about the virus was ultimately not considered to be false.
“In short, this tweet is a broad optimistic statement [that doesn’t] incite people to do something harmful, nor does it recommend against taking precautions or following mask directives (or other guidelines),” Following the revelation of his undercover inquiry into internal papers before Musk shared them with media, Baker was recently “exited” from Twitter, according to Roth.
When he made internal correspondence from Twitter’s former management available to unbiased journalists in December, Elon Musk gave a glimpse into the closed-off world of the company. The records made unsettling revelations about the company’s use of blacklisting particular people and its secret discussions with FBI representatives about accounts connected to President Trump before his account was permanently terminated in January.
In an attempt to preserve the integrity of material discovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop before it was made public, the FBI and other intelligence services organized an operation in October 2020.
In a statement in response to Fox News, the FBI emphasized that their internal inquiry had not turned up any proof of crime or misbehavior on the part of agency officers. “The FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers,” it stated.
“The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public,” the FBI stated. “It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
