The One We've Been Waiting For: Twitter Files on COVID-19 Drops

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

The revelations of past Twitter Files drops have been stunning, to say the least, with direct FBI involvement in the quashing of free speech being perhaps the biggest bombshell. The uncovering of corruption isn’t over yet, though. Not by a long shot.

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The next major installment is, for my money, the one we’ve been waiting for. Namely, it covers Twitter’s suppression of speech in regard to COVID-19, and there are some surprising reveals included. For example, the Trump administration didn’t have its hands clean in regard to coordinating with Twitter to combat “misinformation.”

I may be a partisan, but I’m not a hack, and my consistent standard on “misinformation” has been that the government should not play a role in policing it. There’s simply too much that can happen as far as abuse of power and violations of the First Amendment to let politicians and bureaucrats touch that third rail. The Trump administration may have had good intentions, and their transgressions may have not been nearly as egregious, but it’s still disappointing to see that the former president played that game.

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Of course, Joe Biden took things much further.

As Zweig goes on to explain, Twitter eventually began to shape its moderation around official White House views. That meant suppressing or outright banning medical professionals who were sharing evidence-based views contrary to the “narrative” about things like natural immunity and mask efficacy. Much of that was done by bots which were trained via machine learning to spot certain words and phrases.

Further, moderation activities were outsourced to places like the Philippines where low-level workers were expected to adjudicate serious discussions about things like vaccine side effects. Obviously, that led to some very bad results if you value free speech, and in many cases, truth. Lastly, top executives at Twitter were setting the tone, both by giving the inputs for the AI and telling the moderation teams what to look for.

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Zweig goes on to give some examples of medical professionals who were suppressed or banned, with Dr. Martin Kulldorff being “Exhibit A.”

Oddly enough, I remember seeing that tweet from Kulldorff when he made it and being surprised that it got labeled misinformation. Natural immunity was not a new concept, and for someone to say that those possessing it didn’t need to rush out and get vaccinated should have not been controversial at all. Yet, because it clashed with the White House’s vaccination message, which was to jab every living human being, it was quickly suppressed and labeled as misinformation (falsely, mind you).

Here’s another example of a bot flagging a post and then a human upholding what should have been a reversed decision.

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Using the CDC’s own data to state an objective fact would get you suppressed under Twitter’s old regime if it went against the official narrative. That’s how committed they were to a certain set of talking points. That those talking points came directly from the government (namely, the White House and CDC) only makes things all the worse.

And to be sure, what I’ve highlighted here is just the tip of the iceberg. Zweig’s thread continues from there, and we haven’t even gotten the internal documents yet dealing with Dr. Anthony Fauci and his team’s intrusions. I’d suspect those are coming, and they are going to be telling. Stay tuned.

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