A new batch of “Twitter files” released Monday allegedly indicates the Biden administration worked with Twitter to control the public conversation about COVID, which included censoring accounts skeptical of the vaccine.
This update is the latest in a string of internal Twitter revelations since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter and vowed to make public any wrongdoing previous to his ownership that might have gone on behind the scenes.
Since then, Musk has released a trove of troublesome information, including evidence federal law enforcement worked closely with the social media giant to censor Americans. The Biden administration has pushed back against these allegations, but the Twitter files are not the only source giving evidence to that collusion.
Musk shared a Twitter thread Monday posted by author and journalist David Zweig, where Zweig laid out some introductory points, though Musk said more details are coming soon.
Zweig said Twitter “rigged the COVID debate” by “censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. Policy” and “by discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed” as well as “suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s own data.”
“So far the Twitter Files have focused on evidence of Twitter’s secret blacklists; how the company functioned as a kind of subsidiary of the FBI; and how execs rewrote the platform’s rules to accommodate their own political desires,” he said. “The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.”
Zweig, who says he personally reviewed internal documents, said both the Trump and Biden administration participated in the collusion. He said Trump’s team were more worried about “panic buying” at grocery stores while Biden was interested in shutting down accounts skeptical of the vaccine.
“When the Biden admin took over, one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on Covid. The focus was on ‘anti-vaxxer accounts,’” he said. “In the summer of 2021, president Biden said social media companies were ‘killing people’ for allowing vaccine misinformation.”
“But Twitter did suppress views – many from doctors and scientific experts – that conflicted with the official positions of the White House,” he added. “As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.”
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