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The Twitter Files continue to expose the platform’s egregious censorship of the truth — most recently about Covid.

Even through the Christmas break, the team wading through the Twitter Files has continued to expose Twitter’s scandalous censorship of inconvenient facts.

The latest drop has come from David Zweig, whose report appeared first on Twitter and is now available in long form on Bari Weiss’ new media website, The Free Press. The focus of Zweig’s report is how Twitter banned the truth about Covid.

Censored, But Right All Along

Those of us willing to listen to health experts outside of official state and media channels soon saw holes in the official Covid narrative. We suspected that the threat of the virus had been vastly overblown, that lockdowns were doing more harm than good, that those with prior natural immunity had little or no need for vaccination, and that the mRNA injectables were causing heart and other serious health problems.

For these dissident viewpoints, we were branded heretics and conspiracy theorists. Time has vindicated many of our worst suspicions.

Time has also condemned Twitter’s censor-happy staff.

“The platform suppressed true information from doctors and public-health experts that was at odds with U.S. government policy,” Zweig begins his report.

He laments that during the Covid years, “the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions”. Zweig scolds those institutions, noting they “operated in near total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts”.

Indeed, a fake “consensus” on Covid could only be generated by excluding and censoring the many experts who disagreed.

As such, Twitter became an essential outlet 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”. Among the most important information was simply the response of other nations to Covid that differed from the approach taken in the United States.

“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,” Zweig writes.

The U.S. Government Abridged the Freedom of Speech

Zweig’s most scandalous revelation was the role of the White House in urging Twitter to silence the speech of U.S. citizens. So much for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was drawn up to prevent the government from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”.

Even the Trump Administration was guilty of the same, pressing Twitter executives to throttle posts about panic buying to prevent a copycat effect — even though runs on grocery stores were a real phenomenon.

The Biden Administration was far worse. Zweig comments that “its agenda for the American people can be summed up as: Be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe.”

Biden White House officials pressured Twitter to crack down on “anti-vaxxer accounts”. “They were especially concerned about Alex Berenson, a journalist skeptical of lockdowns and mRNA vaccines, who had hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform,” writes Zweig.

Just hours after President Joe Biden claimed that social media companies were “killing people” by allowing vaccine misinformation on their platform, Twitter locked Berenson out of his account. He was later permanently suspended.

More recently, Berenson sued Twitter and is now back on the platform after settling with the Big Tech giant. During that lawsuit, Twitter’s internal communications revealed that “the White House had directly met with Twitter employees and pressured them to take action on Berenson”.

A juicy plot twist in the Twitter files is that Twitter executives did not always give in to the wishes of the Biden Administration. “An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail,” Zweig reveals — “and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government”.

As many people have been asking on Twitter in recent days, what is the legal recourse when the White House is known to have violated the First Amendment?

The Truth about Covid that Twitter Censored

What information about Covid, now known to be true, did Twitter censor? Examples abound.

Martin Kulldorff is an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. For sharing his expert medical opinions — which were often at odds with U.S. public health officials and the American Left — Kulldorff was blacklisted by Twitter, was temporarily suspended, and had his tweets labelled “misleading”.

In March 2021, Kulldorff tweeted, “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people, and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.”

Twitter moderators flagged Kulldorff’s tweet as “false information” that violated the platform’s Covid-19 misinformation policy, even though his statement was an expert’s opinion — and one that was in line with the vaccine policies of multiple other nations. (Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, for instance, have variously restricted the use of the Moderna product for children due to risk of heart inflammation).

Nevertheless, his tweet was given a “misleading” label, all replies were shut off, and Kulldorff’s message was prevented from being seen and shared widely.

Another user, @KelleyKga, whose account fact-checks public health information and has over 18,000 followers, had a tweet flagged as “misleading”, even though it cited CDC data.

@KelleyKga disagreed with someone claiming that “Since December of 2021 COVID has been the leading cause of death from disease in children.” That claim was demonstrably false: Covid has never been the leading cause of death from disease in children. Yet it was @KelleyKga — and not the purveyor of the bogus claim — who was censored by Twitter.

In another case, a physician who runs a Twitter account called Infectious Disease Ethics had a tweet labelled as “misleading” even though it simply referred to the results of a peer-reviewed study that found a link between the mRNA injectables and cardiac arrests in Israeli youth.

Likewise, a Rhode Island physician by the name of Andrew Bostom was permanently suspended from Twitter after publishing results from a peer-reviewed study that uncovered a link between the mRNA drug and lower sperm count in sperm donors. 

Should We Censor the President?

One comical exchange that took place between Twitter staff centred on a tweet by then-President Donald Trump. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump wrote in the offending tweet. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”

In this case, Trump’s censor at Twitter was deputy general counsel Jim Baker, who had previously worked in a similar role at the FBI, and has since been fired by Elon Musk for colluding with the FBI to censor users on the platform.

Baker tried to convince Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety, that Trump’s tweet was “a violation of our Covid-19 policy”. Roth had to spell it out to Baker that the President urging Americans not to be afraid is a “broad, optimistic statement” that “doesn’t incite people to do something harmful” and therefore did not fall within the scope of Twitter’s policies.

It will take many more months for Bari Weiss’ team to sift through the Twitter Files and complete the jigsaw of what went on behind the veil at the little blue bird. Even so, as David Zweig summarises, here is what we already know:

At Twitter, Covid-related 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…

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?

Keep your ear to the ground for more answers. In the meantime, be sure to fact check the fact-checkers and take every “misleading” tag on social media with a generous grain of salt.

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Image by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash.