On Monday, reporter and author David Zweig released the TWITTER FILES: ‘HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE.’
Zweig tweeted:
“– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*”
1. THREAD:
THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE
– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
Read the full thread below:
3. What we have yet to cover is Covid. This reporting, for The Free Press, @thefp, is one piece of that important story.
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
5. Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @thefp showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
7. It wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. pic.twitter.com/OgOrRxBBBW
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
9. In the summer of 2021, president Biden said social media companies were “killing people” for allowing vaccine misinformation. Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month.
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
11. A December 2022 summary of meetings with the White House by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, adds new evidence of the White House’s pressure campaign, and cements that it repeatedly attempted to directly influence the platform.
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
13. Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. 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.
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
15. There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process:
First, much of the content moderation was conducted by bots, trained on machine learning and AI – impressive in their engineering, yet still too crude for such nuanced work.
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
17 Third, 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. As it is with all people and institutions, there was individual and collective bias
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
19. 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.
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
21. 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.” pic.twitter.com/lq9QOP8h27
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
23. After Twitter took action, 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, the ostensible core function of the platform: pic.twitter.com/Qa1HpaEray
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
25. A tweet by @KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker, with 18K followers, was flagged as “Misleading,” and replies and likes disabled, even though it displayed the CDC’s *own data.* pic.twitter.com/8ABQzYGpXf
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
27. Tellingly, the tweet by @KelleyKga that was labeled “Misleading” was a reply to a tweet that contained actual misinformation.
Covid has never been the leading cause of death from disease in children. Yet that tweet remains on the platform, and without a “misleading” label. pic.twitter.com/vK5NpWg8KT
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
29. Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island physician, was permanently suspended from Twitter after receiving multiple strikes for misinformation. One of his strikes was for a tweet referring to the results from a peer reviewed study on mRNA vaccines. pic.twitter.com/Q65KlRwrqs
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
31. 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. pic.twitter.com/KT3q7Ee9CA
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
33. Another example of human bias run amok was the reaction to this tweet by Trump. Many Trump tweets led to extensive internal debates, and this one was no different. pic.twitter.com/kQs1ADPVAk
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
35. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety, had to explain that optimism wasn’t misinformation. pic.twitter.com/1pj8uvzWR1
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
37. Twitter made a decision, via the political leanings of senior staff, and govt pressure, that the public health authorities’ approach to the pandemic – prioritizing mitigation over other concerns – was “The Science” . . .
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
39. 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—not to mention the mainstream press—about the origins of Covid, about lockdowns, about the true risks of Covid in kids, and much more?
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
41. An expanded version of this thread is available now @thefp! https://t.co/3QnsdJk40j
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
Read the expanded version of the thread at The Free Press:
I had always thought a primary job of the press was to be skeptical of power—especially the power of the government. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, I and so many others found that the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions. Those institutions operated in near total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts.
Twitter became an essential alternative. It was a place where those with public health expertise and perspectives at odds with official policy could air their views—and where curious citizens could find such information. This often included other countries’ responses to Covid that differed dramatically from our own.
But it quickly became clear that Twitter also seemed to promote content that reinforced the establishment narrative, and to suppress views and even scientific evidence that ran to the contrary.
Was I imagining things? Was the pattern I and others witnessed proof of purposeful intent? An algorithm gone rogue? Or something else? In other words: When it came to Covid, and the information shared on a service used by hundreds of millions of people, what exactly was being amplified? And what was being banned or censored?
So when The Free Press asked if I would go to Twitter to peek behind the curtain, I took the first flight out of New York.
Here’s what I found.
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