The Biden White House pressured Twitter to both “elevate” and “suppress” users based on their stances on COVID-19 — ultimately “censoring info that was true but inconvenient” to policy makers, according to the latest edition of the “Twitter files” revealed Monday.
The coercion campaign during the pandemic began with the Trump administration — which asked Twitter to crack down on stories about panic buying and “runs on grocery stores” in the early days of the outbreak — but was stepped up under Biden, whose administration was focused on the removal of “anti-vaxxer accounts,” according to The Free Press reporter David Zweig.
For example, in June 2021, hours after Biden publicly raged that social media companies were “killing people” for allowing purported vaccine misinformation to propagate, former New York Times reporter and noted vaccine doubter Alex Berenson was suspended from the site and was ultimately banned.
Berenson responded by suing Twitter, forcing the release of internal communications that showed the White House had pressured the company to squash his account.
In a Slack message from April 2021, an unidentified Twitter employee said the adminstration “had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform”.
“It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine,” Berenson had tweeted.
“Think of it — at best — as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS,” he also wrote.
As recently as this month, Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s head of US public policy, had detailed the White House’s pressure campaign in a series of meetings, according to Zweig.
Culbertson said in her notes that the administration was “very angry” that Twitter had not taken more aggressive action in silencing vaccine critics and wanted the company to do more, files showed.
Among those users whom Twitter did clamp down on was Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who tweeted in March 2021 that people “with prior natural infection do not need” the COVID-19 vaccine, “[n]or [do] children.”
