Once the #TwitterFiles floodgates opened, we knew we were in for some dirt. And dirt is what we’ve been getting. Unbelievably filthy dirt. The dirtiest dirt.
And here’s a little more, this time from investigative journalist Lee Fang. It’s a relatively short thread compared to some of the other #TwitterFiles threads we’ve seen, but you’ll find it’s still decidedly eye-opening. This particular thread concerns pharmaceutical companies coordination with social media companies like Twitter to promote certain vaccine policy narratives while suppressing others:
1. New piece from the TWITTER FILES.
How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy.The push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries.
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
2. In 2020, it was clear that the pandemic would require rapid innovation. Early on, there was a push to make the solution equitable: an international partnership to share ideas, technology, new forms of medicine to rapidly solve this crisis. https://t.co/L4QNcCCzCE
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
3. But global drug giants saw the crisis as an opportunity for unprecedented profit. Behind closed doors, pharma launched a massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new covid-related medicine, including therapeutics and vaccines.
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
4. BIO, the lobby group that represents biopharma, including Moderna & Pfizer, wrote to the newly elected Biden admin, demanding the U.S. gov sanction any country attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost covid medicine or vaccines. https://t.co/EOX8HoYD46
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
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5. That brings us to Twitter. The global lobbying blitz includes direct pressure on social media. BioNTech, which developed Pfizer's vaccine, reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines. pic.twitter.com/6cVIRcUDZV
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
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 pic.twitter.com/Bt9YNJUlN1
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
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. https://t.co/qIH0Tngsm1
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
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.
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
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."
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
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. pic.twitter.com/emWC2Dmg3E
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
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. pic.twitter.com/Xb9gcMxOLL
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
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. pic.twitter.com/wNPPx1IiRD
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
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://t.co/FTzQsGKM9i
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
Why was some “misinformation” more equal than others? We saw this sort of thing over and over again with directives from the U.S. government, the Biden campaign … where does it end?
If you’re interested, Fang has further reading on the subject:
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://t.co/McEaKZ2MKX
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
“What I saw could be limited.” It’s hard not to read that and wonder what else might be out there that’s even more damning than what we’ve already seen so far.
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