Alex Berenson is a reporter who was suspended from Twitter due to his reporting on the ‘Unspecified virus of unknown origin’ (as The Critical Drinker (@TheCriticalDri2) liked to say to mock YouTube’s censorship regime).
But Mr. Berenson successfully sued Twitter to get his account back, and today he is adding to the #TwitterFiles:
#TwitterFiles @elonmusk
1/ URGENT: Twitter's own lawyers believed the company could not successfully defend its Covid vaccine censorship policies against my lawsuit over its 2021 ban of my account. pic.twitter.com/EZn846Xu8h— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
2/ Twitter was likely to lose Berenson v Twitter, my federal lawsuit against the company for banning me over my mRNA vaccine reporting, Twitter’s lawyers concluded after reviewing internal documents related to the ban.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
3/ The documents, whose details remain secret but which the lawyers called “problematic” and “sensitive,” also show Twitter’s most senior executives disagreed over its decision to censor me in the summer of 2021.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
4/ The newly revealed secret debate inside Twitter’s former leadership highlights the still-unanswered question of whether Twitter banned me because it feared government or corporate retribution for allowing me to continue to publish on its site.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
And that is the crux of the debate. As Justice Robert Jackson wrote when speaking for the Supreme Court:
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.
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West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). And yet for months during the lockdowns there was exactly that: Anyone who questioned the government was silenced by social media companies. This is troubling in any case, but if it was done by illegal government pressure, it becomes a violation of the Constitution—a point missed by the David Frenchs of the world:
‘Skynet Is A Private Company, They Can Do What They Want,’ Says Man Getting Curb-Stomped By Terminator https://t.co/1HBdQXfiah
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 19, 2021
Returning to Mr. Berenson’s thread:
5/ That issue is central to Berenson v Biden, my new lawsuit against the @WhiteHouse and @Pfizer for allegedly conspiring to violate my First Amendment rights by coercing Twitter to ban me.
It also impacts Missouri v Biden, about broader federal social media censorship efforts. pic.twitter.com/OnsiLDSDI9
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
6/ Exactly what the documents say is still unclear. The lawyers describe them only generally. But they troubled the lawyers so much, the lawyers advised Twitter to settle my suit rather than risk them becoming public – even if the company had to agree to most of my demands.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
7/ Twitter's lawyers mention the documents in two separate email chains in 2022. The chains, which include Twitter’s then-general counsel, Sean Edgett, were given to me by Michael Shellenberger. @shellenberger found them in Twitter’s records during his Twitter Files reporting.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
8/ In 2020 and spring 2021, Twitter encouraged me to use my account to cover Covid and the mRNA jabs and defended my right to do so to critics.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
9/ But it abruptly reversed course in summer 2021, after federal officials demanded censorship and @JoeBiden said social media companies were “killing people” by allowing their users to question the shots.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
10/ After warning me three times in July 2021, Twitter banned me Aug. 28, 2021 for allegedly violating its Covid-19 rules. At the time, I was a leading critic of potential mRNA jab mandates and my tweets on the safety and efficacy of the shots were viewed millions of times a day.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
11/ I sued Twitter four months later in federal court in San Francisco, alleging it had broken its own rules and violated my rights when it banned me.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
12/ In July 2022, Twitter and I settled my lawsuit. Twitter restored my account and admitted I hadn’t violated its rules. But Twitter has never explained why it censored me. The analysis its lawyers made suggests it did not believe it could convince a jury it could.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
13/ Karen Colangelo, Twitter’s head of global litigation, and Micah Rubbo, associate director for litigation, reached that conclusion after reviewing Twitter’s internal discussions about my ban, the May 2022 email chain shows.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
14/ Colangelo described the documents as “problematic” and “sensitive.” She and Rubbo recommended Twitter meet many of my settlement demands in the lawsuit to avoid handing them over.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
15/ My settlement remains secret (though I have asked @ElonMusk, who bought Twitter in October 2022, after the settlement was reached, for the right to publish it).
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
Musk does need to waive confidentiality on this subject.
16/ But according to the email chain, my demands included restoring my account, giving me special protection against future bans, turning over communications and complaints Twitter had received about me from outside sources, and allowing me to publish whatever it gave me.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
Notice the subtle framing. He is saying it this way so that it is clear that he is not violating the confidentiality portion of the settlement agreement.
17/ The company faced a stark choice, Rubbo concluded in analyzing a potential settlement: “Are we willing to litigate and risk the potential public disclosure of *many* documents in order to prevent disclosure of some of them now?”
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
18/ The decision was especially complicated because Twitter was still sorting through its files and didn’t know what all of them contained, Rubbo wrote.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
19/ The company was very concerned with giving me special protection, according to the email chain. But it ultimately believed it could find a solution by offering me access to a neutral arbitrator.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
20/ Twitter’s lawyers also considered if it should simply “significantly increase our monetary offer and take reinstatement off the table,” but ultimately decided not to bother trying to buy its way out of the lawsuit “as money doesn’t seem to be the motivating force here.”
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
Duh.
21/ In a separate August 2022 email, Rubbo explained the documents Twitter kept secret in the settlement with me reveal “debate and disagreement” among Twitter’s “leadership” over its censorship decisions. pic.twitter.com/ylPrNJEE1H
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
22/ Lower-level employees in the company’s Trust and Safety (T&S) unit, the division responsible for making most ban and censorship decisions, also disagreed about Twitter’s actions, according to the documents.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
23/ The May and August email chains became available because of Musk’s decision to open Twitter’s internal records to journalists to reveal the political and censorship pressures Twitter has faced. Those records and the articles about them are generally called the Twitter Files.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
24/ Michael Shellenberger, who has written several Twitter Files articles, discovered the emails as part of his research and provided them to me.@shellenberger
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
25/ The documents Twitter provided to me in the settlement last year showed that both the White House and Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb pressured the company to censor me over my reporting. pic.twitter.com/qxR4W67BJf
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
26/ Those revelations became the core of Berenson v Biden, which I filed in April in federal court in New York, naming six defendants, including President Biden, Dr. Gottlieb, and Pfizer’s chief executive Albert Bourla.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
27/ But the newly revealed emails from Twitter’s lawyers suggest that when it turned over documents to me last year, Twitter used the narrowest possible definition.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
28/ The company appears to have included only internal discussions that occurred directly from specific external communications. Did the company’s leaders or other employees discuss how the overall censorship pressures Twitter faced in 2021 should affect my reporting and account?
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
29/ If those documents exist, Twitter’s lawyers viewed them as outside the settlement and did not disclose them, keeping me from seeing them.
For now.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 1, 2023
Not much more needs to be said than what Mr. Berenson said, but we will add that this account has helpfully compiled all the Twitter Files information. Here:
All Twitter Files to date have been aggregated here. Includes links to original threads by the twitter files journalists. I will add this one now. Let me know if I missed an entry or an important story related to the releases.https://t.co/k4aJzvtuFl
— Crowdsourced News (@CrowdsrcNews) June 1, 2023
There are many forces out there trying to keep Twitter from being a space of essentially free speech, including foreign government, large companies using their advertising dollars, liberal activists, etc. Winning that fight won’t happen overnight, but it is always worth the time and effort to do so.
And on the substance, let’s not forget that one way or the other, China was responsible for the virus. Whatever you think the origin of the virus was—whether it was a bioweapon that escaped from a lab, or it was the result of people eating bats from a wet market—it was China’s fault. If you believe natural origin theory, we had been warning China to close those wet markets for years. Maybe if China had any concept of freedom they could have said “we don’t regulate that sort of thing,” but totalitarian countries can’t invoke that excuse. Likewise, if it was not a 100% natural origin, then it is really their fault.
So, it was China’s fault, no matter how you slice it. They wrecked the entire world and caused millions of deaths. And it is nothing less than a scandal that China has paid no price for it.
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