How Twitter Rigged The Covid Debate, Discredited Information, Suppressed Ordinary Users, And Got Away With It

After Twitter CEO Elon Musk took over the platform, he selected journalists to read and report on internal company documents to increase transparency. First, we got a major bombshell dropped on us by journalist Matt Taibbi. One after another, independent journalists Michael Schellenberger, Leighton Woodhouse, Abigail Shrier, Lee Fang, and most recently David Zweig have all had the opportunity to pull back the curtains on what’s been going on at Twitter over the years and expose company corruption. 

Throughout the Twitter Files drops, we’ve learned about Twitter’s covert blacklist of users, their active relationship with the FBI, and how they’ve purposefully guided political narratives. In the most recent drop, the public finally had its suspicions confirmed: Twitter walked in lockstep with the government to censor information about the Covid-19 pandemic and shut down doctors, experts, and just average users who dared to disagree.

Tech Companies De-Platformed Curious Users Who Questioned the Mainstream Pandemic Narrative

Though corruption at Twitter HQ began long before the onset of the pandemic, internal emails released through the Twitter Files drops revealed that the U.S. government put pressure on Twitter to suppress certain content while elevating other content, beginning in the Trump administration but continuing in the Biden administration.

If you recall, panic-buying before hunkering down was all too common before lockdowns fully set in, and grocery stores ran dry of basic goods like toilet paper and shelf-stable food items. The Trump administration had meetings and exchanged emails with Twitter employees in an effort to combat “misinformation” about panic-buying leaving grocery store shelves empty, despite that being an unfortunate reality.

However, once the Biden administration set in, the U.S. government’s narrative for Twitter employees was, as Zweig so nicely put it, “be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe.” One of the first methods for shutting down alleged misinformation was by targeting users who might be “anti-vaxxers.” Alex Berenson, lockdown and mRNA vaccine skeptic journalist, was highlighted in the Twitter Files as one of the accounts that was locked and then permanently suspended after President Biden warned the public against social media being used to “kill people” by allowing supposed vaccine misinformation.

Apparently, the Biden administration wanted more than Twitter could agree to. According to Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy Lauren Culbertson, the Biden team was “very angry” about how Twitter wasn’t doing more on the offensive by aggressively deplatforming multiple accounts. Twitter did intentionally suppress the views of individuals like Berenson and even academics or public health professionals who had legitimate questions and qualms about the Covid-19 lockdown policies, however.

Bots Were Purposefully Programmed with a Bias in Mind

Here’s a brief breakdown of Twitter’s censorship process, which led to legitimate content that disproved or even so much as questioned the establishment dogma being silenced and users who spread it being temporarily or permanently suspended.

Content moderation began with bots backed up by AI and machine learning. The bots were told what to look for by engineers, and as time went on, their search process would refine itself and, in a perfect world, hopefully not catch too much extra, unnecessary content to censor in its sweep. Unfortunately, many human content moderators were remote workers in distant cubicle farms (plenty of whom were overseas in countries like the Philippines) who were tasked with policing complex topics like the efficacy of masks or rates of myocarditis. 

The final nail in the coffin was the fact that high-ranking Twitter employees had the last word on what the bots and the cubicle farm workers were supposed to look for. As we know, those formerly in Twitter’s c-suite and many other social media elites aren’t shy about their biases.

A physician from Rhode Island named Andrew Bostom was served a permanent suspension from Twitter on the premise that he was spreading misinformation, despite the fact one of his strikes from Twitter’s censors referenced peer-reviewed research on mRNA vaccines’ effects on sperm concentration and count. 

Well, later in the drop by Zweig, we learned that physician Euzebiusz Jamrozik, who runs the account @ID_ethics, was shadowbanned for tweeting about young people in Israel experiencing cardiac arrests after receiving their mRNA vaccines. His tweet was labeled “misleading” despite the research being from a peer-reviewed study.

Furthermore, in the Twitter Files we learned that an average Twitter user with a reasonably large following, @KelleyKga, who called herself a public health fact checker, got booted from the platform after Twitter deemed she was misleading the public by saying that Covid-19 wasn’t the leading cause of death from disease in children. Turns out that @KelleyKga was actually citing CDC data, but because that information could have led people to have a more lenient response to the pandemic, she was silenced.

Will Tech Elites Ever Show Remorse for Their Actions?

Lockdowns and other Covid policies set by the government and propped up by Twitter resulted in serious repercussions. Children were barred from seeing their classmates in person, young adults didn’t get to walk at graduation, and, as Zweig astutely pointed out, many underprivileged youths are now educationally behind their peers in subjects like English and math. Small business owners’ American dreams were shattered, elderly family members died in isolation, and large populations were misled into believing that masks could keep them healthy, despite their own god-emperor Dr. Fauci having once unconditionally stated that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”

With Zweig’s report, we gained the opportunity to read through emails that showed how Twitter was intentionally rigging the debate about Covid-19 itself and the public health protocols set in place to keep the American people from turning their backs on the government’s decisions. Journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files drop, released before Zweig’s, alleged that not only the White House was involved, but the CIA and FBI also got their hands dirty in content moderation. 

All the while, the mainstream media is doing its part to undermine the Twitter Files’ findings and assure the public that there’s no cooperation between Twitter and the federal government in regulating free speech. CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN lacked any substantial coverage of the Twitter Files at the time of writing, with CNN headlines reading “Elon Musk claims the FBI paid Twitter to ‘censor info from the public.’ Here’s what the Twitter Files actually show” or even “Why news organizations are largely skeptical of Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ theater.”

This isn’t just political theater, this is real life. The Twitter Files have revealed that the FBI paid the platform $3.4 million to undermine the truth about then-presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s foreign business scandal. What’s more, FBI employees even went over to work for Twitter. In response, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) is reaching across the aisle and asking Democrats to work with Republicans on an investigation into the FBI and other federal agencies tangled up in the Twitter debacle. He alleged to the Daily Signal that the corruption revealed in the Twitter Files is “only the tip of the iceberg” and stated that with the U.S. House of Representatives now having a Republican majority, an investigation will likely ensue.

Closing Thoughts

Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, all signs point to Twitter promoting establishment narratives and working to suppress alternative views that even had scientific backing. With the establishment media failing to cover the Twitter Files, average Americans are missing out on major information that’s simply being written off as right-wing propaganda. If outlets like the Washington Post, which touts the saying “democracy dies in darkness,” really meant it, they would care about these genuine threats to democracy that silence individuals who speak out and offer counterarguments to their narratives. Perhaps instead of blindly trusting the experts, we should insist on questioning things that don’t quite line up with logic and real data. 

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