6. Twitter's reps responded quickly to the pharma request, which was also backed by the German government. A lobbyist in Europe asked the content moderation team to monitor the accounts of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & of activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine
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7. The potential "fake accounts" that Twitter monitored for protesting Pfizer? These were real people. Here's one the Twitter team flagged for potential terms of use violations. I talked to Terry, a 74 year old retired bricklayer in the UK on the phone.
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8. It's not clear what actions Twitter ultimately took on this particular request. Several Twitter employees noted in subsequent messages that none of this activism constituted abuse. But the company continued monitoring tweets.
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9. In a separate push, Pfizer & Moderna's lobbying group, BIO, fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects, which worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid "misinformation."
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10. BIO provided $1,275,000 to the campaign, part of which is revealed through tax forms. The PGP campaign, called "Stronger," helped Twitter create content moderation bots, select which public health accounts got verification, helped crowdsource content takedowns.
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11. Many of the tweets the BIO-funded campaign focused on were truly unhinged misinfo, like claims that vaccines include microchips. But others Stronger lobbied Twitter on were more of a grey area, like vaccine passports & vaccine mandates, policies that coerce vaccination.
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12. The Moderna/Pfizer-funded campaign included direct regular emails with lists of tweets to takedown & others to verify. Here's an example of those types of emails that went straight to Twitter's lobbyists and content moderators. Many focused on @zerohedge, which was suspended.
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13. Notably, this massive push to censor and label covid misinfo never applied to drug companies. When big pharma wildly exaggerated the risks of creating low-cost generic covid vaccines, Stronger did nothing. The rules applied only to critics of industry.
https://onphr.ma/3WIS8ER
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https://onphr.ma/3WIS8ER
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14. Here is my reported piece w/more detail. I was given some access to Twitter emails. I signed/agreed to nothing, Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by a Twitter attorney, so what I saw could be limited.
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/16/twitter-covid-vaccine-pharma/
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https://theintercept.com/2023/01/16/twitter-covid-vaccine-pharma/
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The Intercept
Covid-19 Drugmakers Pressured Twitter to Censor Activists Pushing for Generic Vaccine
The pressure campaign was just a part of the pharmaceutical industry’s successful lobbying blitz to retain Covid vaccine patents — and make record profits.
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1. THREAD: THE FACEBOOK FILES
Twitter is not the only social media site to face pressure to censor content. I obtained emails showing that the CDC had significant influence over covid moderation at Facebook and Instagram. Here’s what I found.
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Twitter is not the only social media site to face pressure to censor content. I obtained emails showing that the CDC had significant influence over covid moderation at Facebook and Instagram. Here’s what I found.
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Telegram
The Twitter Files
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
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3. For instance, in May 2021, CDC officials began routinely vetting claims about COVID-19 vaccines that had appeared on Facebook. The platform left it up to the federal government to determine which assertions were accurate.
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4. Facebook's moderator notes some of the above claims "would already be violating"—an implicit admission that the CDC's opinion on the other claims would be a deciding factor in whether the platform would restrict such content.
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5. Facebook was clearly a willing participant in this process; moderators repeatedly thanked the CDC for its "help in debunking."
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6. Claims vetted by the CDC included whether "COVID-19 is man-made." The CDC told Facebook that it was "theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely."
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7. By July 2021, the CDC wasn't just evaluating which claims it thought were false, but whether they could "cause harm."
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8. Then, in November, the FDA granted emergency authorization for children to receive Pfizer's COVID vaccine. Meta proudly informed the CDC that it would remove false claims—"i.e. the COVID vaccine is not safe for kids"—from FB and Insta.
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