The US government put the squeeze on social media companies to censor what it called COVIC-19 "misinformation" even if the material being censored was true..David Zwieg, a reporter with The Free Press, was given access to Twitter files exposing communications between Twitter staff and government agencies..“The Biden White House pressured Twitter to both 'elevate' and 'suppress' purported COVID-19 ‘misinformation’ but ended up “censoring info that was true but inconvenient” to policymakers,” writes Zwieg on Twitter in the latest ‘Twitter Files’ release..“The coercion campaign during the pandemic began with the Trump administration, but was stepped up under Biden, whose administration was focused on the removal of 'anti-vaxxer accounts'.” .Zwieg reveals the documents confirm meetings at the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others..The Trump administration was initially concerned about reports of panic buying and sought “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation,” according to emails sent by Twitter employees in the wake of meetings with the White House. .“One area of so-called misinformation was ‘runs on grocery stores.’ The trouble is that it wasn't misinformation, there actually were runs on goods,” says Zwieg..When Joe Biden moved into the White House, his administration's focus was spreading fear of the virus, adding “do exactly what we say to stay safe.”.In June 2021, hours after Biden publicly raged that social media companies were “killing people” by allowing purported vaccine misinformation to propagate, former New York Times reporter and noted vaccine doubter Alex Berenson was banned from the site..Berenson responded by suing Twitter, forcing the release of internal communications that showed the White House had pressured the company to squash his account..“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.”.Zwieg notes in July 2021, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a 22-page advisory concerning what the World Health Organization referred to as an “infodemic,” and called on social media platforms to do more to shut down ‘misinformation.’.“We are asking them to step up,” Murthy said, referring to the social media platforms. “We can’t wait longer for them to take aggressive action.” .“That’s the message the White House had already taken directly to Twitter executives in private channels,” writes Zwieg. “One of the Biden administration’s first meeting requests was about Covid, with a focus on “anti-vaxxer accounts,” according to a meetings summary by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of US Public Policy.”.In the summary, written this month and emailed to colleagues, Culbertson adds new evidence of the White House’s pressure campaign, and illustrates how it tried to directly influence what content was allowed on Twitter..“Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was “very angry” that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more,” writes Zwieg. “But Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government.”.However, Twitter did suppress views from many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions. .“As a result, legitimate findings and questions about our COVID policies and their consequences went missing,” writes Zwieg..The writer identifies three serious problems with Twitter’s process..First: Much of the content moderation on COVID-19 was conducted by bots trained on machine learning and AI. A Twitter engineer told Zwieg that initially the bots were fed information to train them on what to look for. Even though the process was refined over time and impressive in their engineering, the bots would prove too crude for such nuanced work. .“When you drag a digital trawler across a social media platform, you’re not just catching cheap fish, you’re going to snag dolphins along the way,” writes Zwieg..Second: Contractors from around the world were moderating content but tasking non-experts to adjudicate tweets on complex topics such as myocarditis was destined for a significant error rate. .“The notion that remote workers, sitting in distant cube farms, were going to police medical information to this granular degree is absurd on its face,” writes Zwieg..Third: “Most importantly, the buck stopped with higher level employees at Twitter. They chose the inputs for the bots and decision trees. They determined suspensions. And as is the case with all people and institutions, there was both individual and collective bias.”.“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,” writes Zwieg.
