MinotStateBeav said:
New Twitter Files dropped, new reporter named Zweig for 'The Free Press'. Same outfit as Bari Weiss.
This relates to covid, the WH being directly involved both Trump and Biden admins.
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.
Berenson sued (and then settled with) Twitter. In the legal process Twitter was compelled to release certain internal communications, which showed direct White House pressure on the company to take action on Berenson.
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.
Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was "very angry" that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more
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.
But Twitter did suppress viewsmany from doctors and scientific expertsthat conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.
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.
Example: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, tweeted views at odds with US public health authorities and the American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter. (He tweeted that he disagreed with vaccinating children and young adults with previous natural infection).
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."
But Kulldorff's statement 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.
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:
