Some Confirmation Of My View On Twitter And More

Elon Musk gave Alex Berenson, a gadfly journalist and COVID skeptic, access to Twitter's files last week. Berenson had been banned from Twitter in 2021, but he successfully sued for reinstatement in an action separate from Musk's takeover before that took place.

What Musk is really offering is the chance to search Twitter’s systems seeking information about specific topics, in a process akin to discovery in civil lawsuits. Reporters ask for searches. Twitter turns over what it finds to be read or screenshotted at Twitter headquarters but retains the original documents.

. . . Musk is making available an unprecedented trove of evidence about government and private efforts to suppress free speech on the most important global platform for journalism. Musk’s decision is not risk-free and has little or no appreciable benefit for him. Everyone - Democrat, Republican, or independent - should thank him for doing it.

On his Substack, Berenson outlines one particular episode of censorship that reveals the underside of the whole official COVID narrative:

On August 27, 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb - a Pfizer director with over 550,000 Twitter followers - saw a tweet he didn’t like, a tweet that might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines.

The tweet explained correctly that natural immunity after Covid infection was superior to vaccine protection. It called on the White House to “follow the science” and exempt people with natural immunity from upcoming vaccine mandates.

. . . By suggesting some people might not need Covid vaccinations, the tweet could raise questions about the shots. Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on Covid public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year.

Gottlieb stepped in, emailing Todd O’Boyle, a top lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office who was also Twitter’s point of contact with the White House.

The post was “corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. He worried it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage.”

The tweet, from Dr Brett Giroir, also, like Dr Gottlieb a former FDA head, is below:

You can see from the screenshot that Twitter labeled Dr Giroir's tweet as "misleading". Berensn outlines the background:

Through Jira, an internal system Twitter used for managing complaints, O’Boyle forwarded Gottlieb’s email to the Twitter “Strategic Response” team. That group was responsible for handling concerns from the company’s most important employees and users.

“Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner,” O’Boyle wrote - failing to mention that Gottlieb was a Pfizer board member with a financial interest in pushing mRNA shots.

A Strategic Response analyst quickly found the tweet did not violate any of the company’s misinformation rules.

Yet Twitter wound up flagging Giroir’s tweet anyway, putting a misleading tag on it and preventing almost anyone from seeing it. It remains tagged even though several large studies have confirmed the truth of Giroir’s words.

At the time, Pfizer was a major advertiser on Twitter, and in fact, it very visibly withdrew its advertising when Musk took over:

Food company General Mills Inc., GIS -0.24% decrease; Oreo maker Mondelez International Inc., MDLZ -0.04%decrease; Pfizer Inc. PFE -0.53%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Volkswagen AG’s VOW -0.16%decrease; Audi are among a growing list of brands that have temporarily paused their Twitter advertising in the wake of the takeover of the company by Elon Musk, according to people familiar with the matter.

Some advertisers are concerned that Mr. Musk could scale back content moderation, which they worry would lead to an increase in objectionable content on the platform.

Under normal journalistic disclosure standards, a newspaper or TV broadcast that covered the story would need to mention that Pfizer is an advertiser, which could affect coverage. Apparently there's no equivalent requirement for Twitter to disclose this. If there were, Twitter would presumably need to disclose that Pfizer was an advertiser immediately after labeling the Giroir tweet "misleading".

On one hand, this confirms my view that Twitter advertisers and blue-check users viewed Twitter as a kind of ultra-respectable guardian of the Overton window comparable to PBS. On the other, it's now clearer that advertising on the platform, as well as potentially investment in Twitter, was a form of protection money -- if Big Pharma objected to COVID skepticism of any sort, it could summon moderation. Once there was any suggestion that advertiser-friendly moderation policies would be withdrawn, the advertisers left. This wasn't groupthink, it was financial punishment.

But Big Pharma worked through the government and the public health bureaucracies as well:

The files so far have not turned up much evidence of FBI interest in censoring discussion around the coronavirus or the Covid vaccines.

The Department of Homeland Security, the public health bureaucracies, and the Biden Administration itself seem to have led that effort, which accelerated dramatically in early 2021, after the vaccines became widely available and Biden took over.

But let's still keep in mind that the COVID narrative collapsed notwitstanding all the efforts to control it via Twitter. The sub rosa debate between Gottlieb, who insisted that everyone needed the vax to be immune, and Giroir, who insisted that those who'd had COVID didn't need the vax, was overtaken by events when it became clear that anyone, vaxed or not, could get COVID again, and it's never been completely clear whether the vax was as safe as either claimed.

Pfizer could have withdrawn its advertising on Twitter due to the potential for less moderation -- but they could just as easily have decided it simply wasn't worth the money to try to control the debate that way. This is a big problem with the whole Twitter business model.