According to the latest release of “Twitter Files”, during the pandemic, the internet watchdog, the Stanford Internet Observatory, launched a sweeping effort to purge social media platforms of unwanted opinions related to COVID, whether or not the messages were true.
Internal emails released Friday by journalist Matt Taibbi show how the Stanford Internet Observatory Virality Project coordinated with several other academic institutions and publicly funded nonprofits to conduct a massive operation to monitor vaccine misinformation and shape platform policy to rid the web of from views that have disappeared. against the liberal mainstream.
Mr Taibbi said Twitter was one of six social media platforms that partnered with the Virality Project to monitor COVID-related posts during the pandemic.
In addition to the direct line for flagging posts, the collaboration also included a periodic roundup of vaccine misinformation spread across platforms, lists of repeat offenders, and lists of “truthful content that could contribute to mistrust of vaccines.”
The package of truthful information that the Virality Project wanted to ban included “viral posts by people expressing hesitancy about vaccines” and/or “stories of real vaccine side effects.”
The watchdog also took aim at discussions about vaccine passports, warning that such messages have “spurred a broader anti-vaccine narrative of loss of rights and freedoms.”
Mr. Taibbi said the project was an “Orwellian proof of concept” that “accelerated the evolution of digital censorship from true/false judgment to a new, more frightening model that openly focuses on political narrative at the expense of facts.” “.
The Stanford Internet Observatory did not respond to a request for comment.
The Twitter Files are the result of Elon Musk opening up the company’s email vault to select journalists after he took over Twitter in October 2022. It exposed the company’s politically biased behavior and partnerships with federal officials during the 2020 presidential campaign and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. 19 pandemic.
In February 2021, the Virality Project emailed Twitter executives announcing the newly formed partnership and started a conversation about “how we can best collaborate with the Twitter team on this work.”
“Our goal is to connect with your team through which we can spread vaccine-related misinformation narratives that we flag either on Twitter or other platforms,” a spokesperson for the Virality Project wrote in an email to executives. companies. .
The Virality project was given access to Twitter’s internal ticketing system to flag posts, and announced in a March 2021 email that it was “starting to expand” its notification process to other platforms.
Speaking before the federal government’s House Arms Subcommittee last week, Mr. Taibbi and fellow Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger warned of an “industrial censorship complex” that is undermining Americans’ free speech.
In December, two journalists began revealing the extent of the federal government’s collaboration with Twitter executives to moderate content on the platform.
The Twitter files also revealed what Mr. Taibbi describes as a vast network of censorship that included online speech monitoring programs spearheaded by non-governmental organizations to suppress speech outside the mainstream.
“This is a serious threat to people of all political persuasions,” Mr. Taibbi said. “The First Amendment and the American population, accustomed to the right of speech, is the left’s best defense against the censorship industrial complex. If there’s anything the Twitter files show, it’s that we risk losing this most precious right, without which all democratic rights are impossible.”
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