Twitter Staff Pivoted to Censoring So-Called “Medical Misinfo” After Banning Trump

No sooner had Twitter employees succeeded in mobbing sitting President Donald Trump off the social media platform in 2021 despite there having been no violations of Twitter’s terms of service made by Trump than the tweeps, as they are known, took it upon themselves to censor medical information. 

In Monday’s installment of the Twitter Files, as told by Bari Weiss, it was revealed that as of January 9, 2021, one day after Trump’s speech on Twitter was silenced, “employees expressed eagerness to tackle ‘medical misinformation’ as soon as possible,” Weiss reported.

Internal communications show that Twitter employees were eager to take control of content and bend it to their own biases. “Yes,” one employee wrote, “we absolutely plan to do this in 2021 – with the timeline being ‘as soon as possible.”

While COVID was the thrust, as the world was still engaged in an ongoing pandemic, the employee wrote that “COVID is one specific disease; medical misinformation is a much broader category of harmful content.”

“We’ve laid a lot of the groundwork for policy and product behavior through our work on COVID and the election,” the employee wrote, seemingly proud of their efforts to silence and suppress the voices of doctors, election officials, and civilians they did not agree with on these hot-button issues.

The employee went on to note the departments at Twitter that were hard at work censoring users on the platform, saying “the Misinfo Policy team… along with the folks in  Health Experience, TwS, Research, and other teams across the company are now focussed on getting to a place of improved maturity in how our policies are actualized (across reporting, operations, global scale, scope, etc.”

“We’ll have more to share on this soon!” The employee wrote.

In response to this, another employee was also gleeful about the news that they could soon begin operating to suppress and censor content based on their own biases and assumptions rather than based on written policy. 

“Very excited to see us handling more categories of misinformation,” the employee wrote. “For the longest time, Twitter’s stance was that we aren’t the arbiter of truth which I respected but never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.

“That said,” the employee continued, “my dad is an MD (to give context) and medical information is a really hard topic. Even for COVID-19 we only covered a narrow category of information. As an example, is ‘Take vitamin C, vitamin D, elderberry, and xylitol with GSE daily to reduce covid-19 risk’ good information, creative marketing, or misinformation? Personally, I’m not sure and I suspect there are views on both sides.” 

It was in the spirit of banning “Covid misinformation” that people who criticized lockdowns and school closures, like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was banned. In a previous Twitter Files drop, Weiss reported that Twitter prevented noted doctor Jay Bhattacharya’s tweets from trending during the pandemic-inspired lockdowns. 

Bhattacharya was an early critic of lockdowns and spoke out against their negative impact on children, who were not as susceptible to the Covid virus. 

Information on alternative treatments for Covid were suppressed and censored, as well as any concerns about vaccine efficacy. Drunk with power off of the Trump ban, Twitter banned sitting US Rep from Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene for citing US government statistics from the VAERS database, where Americans report vaccine side effects. 

Twitter said “We permanently suspended the account you referenced (@mtgreenee) for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy. We’ve been clear that, per our strike system for this policy, we will permanently suspend accounts for repeated violations of the policy.”

Greene was literally citing government statistics from the database, and Twitter employees felt that this was misinformation. Collected data from VAERS goes back to 1990.

“Social media platforms can’t stop the truth from being spread far and wide. Big Tech can’t stop the truth. Communist Democrats can’t stop the truth,” Greene said on Telegram at the time. “I stand with the truth and the people. We will overcome!”

Alex Berenson was banned for asking questions about vaccines, as well. Berenson was reinstated, and he made an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss what he learned after filing, and winning a lawsuit against Twitter. 

“So Twitter, turns out acting on orders from the Biden administration, banned his account. Now, no one really knew that, people only suspected it. But now we know for certain because Berenson did something that Twitter was not expecting: he sued and he won,” Carlson said.

The effect of Twitter’s censorship of medical information was that many media outlets simply stopped covering vaccines, concerns over vaccine efficacy, or questions about the origins of Covid. The censorship over “medical misinformation” had a chilling effect on medical information of any kind that was not directly distributed in a press release from the Biden administration.

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases