The “pandemic app” campaign began with the Trump administration, which called on Twitter to remove stories of “panic buying” and “store raids” from the social network in the early days of the outbreak, but it intensified. with Biden, whose administration focused on removing “vaccine bills,” Free Press reporter David Zweig said.
So, in June 2021, hours after Biden was publicly outraged that social media companies were “killing people” for allowing alleged vaccine misinformation to spread, former New York Times journalist and prominent covid dissident Alex Berenson was suspended from the site and eventually banned. In response, Berenson sued Twitter, eventually forcing the social network to post internal messages showing the White House pressured the company to shut down its account.
In early December, Lauren Culbertson, the head of US public policy at Twitter, told him in detail about the White House lobbying campaign, Zweig said. Culbertson told the reporter that the Biden administration was “very angry” that Twitter was not taking more aggressive steps to silence vaccine critics and wanted the network to do more to that end. Among those banned by Twitter was Dr. Martin Kuhldorf, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, who wrote on Twitter in March 2021 that people “with a prior natural infection do not need the COVID-19 vaccine.”
Kuhldorf’s tweet was labeled “misleading” by the site, even though it was in line with the vaccine policies of “many other countries,” Zweig wrote. Another doctor, Andrew Bostom of Rhode Island, was permanently banned from the social network after posting negative vaccine research results on Twitter and publishing data that the coronavirus is less dangerous to children than the flu. Boston’s account was restored on Christmas morning.
When former President Donald Trump told his supporters in October 2020 that “it feels really good!” After undergoing treatment for COVID-19 at Walter Reed Medical Center and urging his followers not to be afraid of the virus and not let it “dominate your life,” former FBI General Counsel turned Twitter executive James Baker , asked the then CEO of the company: why this message was not marked as “malicious”. “Why is this tweet not a violation of our COVID-19 policy?” Baker asked then-Trust and Safety director Yoel Roth and legal director Stacia Cardill. Roth, who resigned last month after Elon Musk’s November inauguration, told Baker that “optimism is not misinformation.”
The latest revelations come after previous “Twitter files” showed the FBI and CIA hacked into the social network, leading it to succumb to political pressure, including the censorship of an exposé by The New York Post in weeks. Leading up to the 2020 election, he detailed how Hunter Biden used his father’s name to secure dubious deals abroad.
