Twitter Files: Massive censorship project unleashed on politically incorrect COVID-19 speech

Internet watchdog Stanford Internet Observatory has taken steps to remove COVID-related objection from its social media platforms, regardless of whether the posts are true or not, according to the latest article in The Twitter Files. started a large-scale effort.

An internal email published by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday said the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project, working with several other academic institutions and government-funded nonprofits, to monitor vaccine misinformation and It shows how to remove vanished views from the web by performing large-scale operations that form platform policies. opposed to the liberal mainstream.

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 direct calls to flag posts, the collaboration includes a regular roundup of vaccine misinformation spread across the platform, a list of repeat offenders, and “genuine content that may fuel vaccine hesitation.” It also included a list of

The bucket of true information that the Virality Project wanted to ban included “viral posts of individuals expressing hesitance about vaccines” and “real stories of vaccine side effects.”

Watchdog also targeted the vaccine passport debate, warning that such posts “spurred a larger anti-vaccine narrative about the loss of rights and freedoms.”

Taibbi said the project will “accelerate the evolution of digital censorship, moving from truth/false judgments to a new and more terrifying model that overtly focuses on political narratives at the expense of facts,” Orwell said. Equivalent to a proof of concept of formula. “

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. This was during the 2020 presidential election and his COVID-19 pandemic.

In February 2021, the Virality Project sent an email to Twitter executives, announcing the newly formed partnership and starting a conversation about “how we can work with the Twitter team on this work.”

“Our goal is to get in touch with your team so you can bring up the vaccine-related disinformation narratives we see on Twitter and other platforms,” said a representative of the Virality Project. wrote to company executives in an email.

The Virality Project was granted access to Twitter’s internal ticketing system to flag posts, and announced in a March 2021 email that it was “starting” the notification process on other platforms.

Appearing before the House Select Committee on Federal Weaponization last week, Taibi and fellow Twitter Files journalist Michael Schellenberger argued that the “censorship industrial complex” was eroding Americans’ free speech. I warned you.

In December, two journalists began exposing the extent to which the federal government is working with Twitter executives to control content on the platform.

The Twitter files also revealed what Taibbi said was a vast web of censorship, including an online speech monitoring program led by a non-governmental organization to suppress marginalized speech. became.

“This is a grave threat to people of all political persuasions,” Taibi said. “Americans, accustomed to the First Amendment and their right to speak out, are the Left’s best defense against the censorship industrial complex. We are at risk of losing our most precious rights, without which all democratic rights are impossible.”