What the ‘Twitter Files’ Say About COVID
Elon Musk’s ongoing “Twitter Files” have been piecemeal exposing corruption in the social media giant. “How Twitter Rigged the COVID Debate” was released yesterday. David Zweig covered the latest batches on behalf of the Free Press.
According to Zweig, the White House under both the Trump and Biden administrations were pressing Twitter to “combat misinformation” about the covid-19 crisis. But pressure from the government became more top-heavy after the Biden team took over in 2021.
Biden’s Washington now wanted Twitter to go after “anti-vaxxers.” These included “high-profile anti-vaxxer accounts” like that of novelist Alex Berenson. Zweig highlights that after Biden in the summer of 2021 claimed anti-vaccination “misinformation” on social media was “killing people,” Berenson’s account was almost immediately suspended. Berenson later sued Twitter. Documents revealed in court show direct involvement of the White House against Berenson.
The case with Alex Berenson was not isolated. A memo from a meeting as recent as this month demonstrates this. The memo was from Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s head of U.S. Public Policy. It reads: “The Biden team was not satisfied with Twitter’s enforcement approach as they wanted Twitter to do more and to deplatform several accounts. Because of this dissatisfaction, we were asked to join several other calls. They were very angry in nature.”
This is despite Twitter’s censoring of anti-government policy tweets regarding covid. A tweet by Harvard Medical school epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff was partially censored. Kulldorff’s tweet claimed the idea that “everybody” in the United States “must be vaccinated” is “scientifically flawed.” His tweet was an “expert opinion” and lined up with the vaccine policies in foreign countries. But it disagreed with the policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc). That was enough to get his post flagged as “misleading” and have replies and likes suspended.
Another example: @KelleyKga, “a self-proclaimed public health fact checker,” published a reply to a misleading tweet. @greg_travis tweeted that covid was the leading cause of disease in children. @KelleyKga used the cdc’s own data to show this wasn’t true. The rates of cancer, heart disease and sids were all greater. Yet @KelleyKga’s tweet was censored; @greg_travis’s tweet was never flagged.
What may be the most surprising example Zweig gives is the case of Andrew Bostom. He is a physician from Rhode Island. Twitter permanently suspended him after “multiple strikes for misinformation.” One of his strikes came from his tweet referencing a peer-reviewed study on mrna vaccines. A later internal audit showed that only one of the five violations on Bostom was actually valid. The one “valid” violation was for an inconvenient comparison of covid-19 and influenza.
“In my review of internal files,” Zweig wrote, “I found countless instances of tweets labeled as ‘misleading’ or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspicions, simply because they veered from cdc guidance or different from establishment views.”
The “Twitter Files” show that the government had an agenda to push—and wasn’t afraid to quash free speech to push it. Such government involvement in the inner workings of a corporation is startling. But evidence exists that the government was more involved with the crisis than only moderating Twitter. To learn more, read “Was the Coronavirus Crisis Engineered?” from our editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s free book America Under Attack.
