A new edition of Twitter Files was released this Monday (26), as a series of reports have been called that show the company’s alleged performance in content censorship, based on the guidance of US government agencies, before the company’s purchase by the billionaire Elon Musk in October.
The new chapter, signed by writer and journalist David Zweig, alleges that the company would have censored and discredited publications regarding Covid-19 for diverging from the policies of the American government during the pandemic.
The report was produced for The Free Press website and had its main topics shared by Zweig on Twitter.
According to the journalist, still in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, the Donald Trump administration organized meetings with technology companies, such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter, to ask for “help from technology companies to combat misinformation” that would lead to panic. of the American population, such as “grocery runs” to stock up on groceries. “But…were
[realmente] there are supermarket runs taking place,” said Zweig.
Then, according to Zweig, in the management of Joe Biden (from 2021), the government began to pressure Twitter regarding what it called “anti-vaxxer accounts”, such as that of Alex Berenson, a journalist critical of the lockdown measures and vaccine safety, especially for children.
“In mid-2021, President Biden said that social media companies were ‘killing people’ by allowing misinformation about vaccines. Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments and kicked off the platform the following month,” Zweig reported.
“Berenson sued (and later settled with) Twitter. In the legal process, Twitter was required to release certain internal communications, which showed direct White House pressure on the company to take action against Berenson,” added Twitter Files.
According to Zweing, the White House kept up the pressure in the following months to directly influence the platform regarding accounts that deviated from official guidance on Covid-19, although “Twitter executives did not fully give in to the wishes of the Biden team. ”.
“But Twitter suppressed opinions — many from doctors and scientific experts — that conflicted with official White House positions. As a result, discoveries and legitimate questions that would have expanded public debate have disappeared. [da plataforma]”, continued Zweig.
The journalist pointed out that a large part of the moderation of content on Twitter was conducted by robots (bots), trained in machine learning and artificial intelligence, “very rudimentary” for a job that required subtleties, and by decision tree models (algorithm of decision). flowchart-like composition), outsourced in countries such as the Philippines, “but tasking non-experts with deciding on tweets about complex topics such as myocarditis or mask efficacy data was bound to have a significant error rate ”.
According to Zweig, this emphasis on bots and decision trees has led to “divergent but legitimate content being labeled as disinformation”. He mentioned the case of Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, who claimed that elderly people from risk groups and their caregivers needed to be vaccinated, unlike children and people already infected.
Kulldorff’s opinions were considered “false information” by Twitter moderators and had interaction tools (such as likes and shares) banned, like publications by other specialists.
Zweig also mentioned the case of Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island physician, who was permanently suspended from Twitter following multiple allegations of spreading misinformation, one of which was a tweet referring to the results of a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines.
“A review of Twitter’s log files revealed that an internal audit, conducted after Boston’s attorney contacted Twitter, found that only one of the five [supostas] Boston violations was valid,” wrote Zweig.
“Bostom’s only tweet that was still listed as a violation cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient for the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of the flu and Covid-19 in children,” he quoted, referring to a tweet from the doctor. in which he cited data from Rhode Island that would indicate that the flu would be more lethal for children than Covid-19 and that the vaccine against the new coronavirus would generate greater morbidity in this public than immunization against the flu.
According to Elon Musk, more information about Twitter’s actions during the pandemic will be released next week.
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