The files, shared in a series of tweets by David Zweig, a New York-based freelance journalist and author, show how top-executives rewrote the platform's rules to accommodate their political desires.
Leaked Twitter files reveal how the United States government pressured Twitter to amplify some content and suppress other content related to COVID-19. The files, shared in a series of tweets by David Zweig, a New York-based freelance journalist and author, show how top executives rewrote the platform's rules to accommodate their political desires.
“When the Biden administration took office, their first meeting request with Twitter executives was on COVID. The focus was on 'anti-vaxxer accounts'. Especially Alex Berenson," Zweig wrote in one of his tweets. He added that in the summer of 2021, President Joe Biden said social media companies were "killing people" for allowing vaccine misinformation.
10. Berenson sued Twitter (and then settled). The legal process forced Twitter to release some internal communications that showed direct White House pressure on the company to act on Berenson.
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— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
The American author was suspended hours after Biden's comments and was escorted off the platform the following month. Berenson later filed a lawsuit and then settled with Twitter. The legal process forced Twitter to release some internal communications that showed the company was under direct White House pressure to act on Berenson, the files show.
Zweig says it wasn't just Twitter that was participating in the meeting and facing pressure from the US government. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others also participated in the meetings with the Trump White House, he writes.
15. Twitter's process had three serious problems:
First, much of the content moderation was handled by bots trained on machine learning and AI – impressive in their engineering, yet still too crude for this kind of nuanced work.
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
One of the tweets showed how a summary of meetings with the White House in December 2022 by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter's head of US public policy, added new evidence of the White House pressure campaign. "Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was 'very angry' that Twitter had not been more aggressive in removing as many accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more," he says.
Twitter executives didn't completely bow to the wishes of the Biden team. But the microblogging platform suppressed views - many from doctors and scientific experts - that conflicted with official White House positions. As a result, valid conclusions and questions that should have broadened public debate disappear, Zweig said in the posts.
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