The Joe Biden administration was “very angry” that Twitter wasn’t doing what the White House felt was enough to censor information surrounding lockdowns, mask mandates, mandatory vaccination, and vaccine passports during the COVID-19 pandemic, a company executive stated in an internal memo.
The revelations came in the next installment of the “Twitter Files” as explained by David Zweig in a thread on behalf of The Free Press on Dec. 26.
The Twitter Files are reports conducted by approved journalists of internal Twitter communications, documents, and systems released by Elon Musk after his $44-billion acquisition of the company showing the state of affairs under the previous management.
COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) is caused by SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that appeared in Wuhan, central China, in late 2019 and quickly spread worldwide following the communist regime’s cover-up of the developing outbreak.
Zweig noted that the White House’s pressure on Twitter before Musk’s acquisition was already public knowledge after an internal fixation on banning former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson resulted in a lawsuit, which was ultimately settled, that brought multiple internal communications into public view during the discovery process.
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The thread stated that a document dated as late as this December penned by Lauren Culbertson, Head of U.S. Public Policy, pointedly stated, “The Biden team was not satisfied with Twitter’s enforcement approach as they wanted Twitter to do more to de-platform several accounts.”
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“Because of this dissatisfaction, we were asked to join several other calls. They were very angry in nature,” Culbertson added.
Zweig noted that Twitter executives usually handled COVID censorship requests with a higher standard of evidence than the government desired when he summarized, “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.”
Nonetheless, the reporter clarified that the pre-Elon Musk management “suppress[ed] views” not only from various accounts, but “many from doctors and scientific experts” who “conflicted with the official positions of the White House.”
One of the more concerning features of Twitter’s crackdown on the COVID narrative was that the company used a combination of machine learning algorithms to systematically punish speech in conjunction with contractors employed in the Philippines.
“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,” Zweig stated.
Regardless of the delegation of frontline work to bots and low paid contractors with limited training, “Most importantly, 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,” Zweig noted.
Zweig was blunt. “With Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas.”
“Inevitably, dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information,” he added.
A specific example provided by Zweig was a March 15 Tweet by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist who held a position as a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, stating, “Thinking everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should.”
“Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children,” Kulldorff added.
The statements provoked Twitter’s censorship machine, generating an internal “intent to action” FYI email, which Zweig posted a copy of in the thread, letting other oversees know that “we will take action” on Kulldorff’s account for “sharing false information regarding the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, which goes against CDC guidelines.”
Zweig noted Kulldorff’s statement, however, “…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.”
The doctor was not met with a ban, however.
Instead, Twitter’s overseers placed a “misleading” label while denying the Tweet the ability to be liked, shared, or replied to, effectively rendering the discussion dead in the water.
Zweig noted this was a function chronically abused as central planners struggled to keep the narrative between narrow Party lines, “In my review of internal files, I found countless instances of tweets labeled as ‘misleading’ or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.”
In another instance, a tweet by physician Euzebiusz Jamrozik pointing out that a peer reviewed study published in the journal Nature that had clearly shown acceptance of the experimental mRNA gene therapy injections in the 16-39 age bracket “are associated with cardiac arrests (not just myocarditis)” was similarly labeled misleading and denied interaction.
But arguably the most egregious precedent cited by Zweig was that of the banning of Rhode Island physician Andrew Bostom, who allegedly received his 5th strike for “misinformation,” resulting in a total ban, after posting a link to a study published in the journal Andrology, which found that the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b mRNA injection for COVID-19 “temporarily impairs semen production.”
Zweig noted, “A review of Twitter log files revealed that an internal audit, conducted after Bostom’s attorney contacted Twitter, found that only 1 of Bostom’s 5 violations were valid.”
The reporter clarified, “The one Bostom tweet found to still be in violation cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children.”
