Free Press reporter David Zweig's 41 tweets reveal how the government, with the complicity of Big Social, controlled the narrative and influenced public reaction to the pandemic. Zweig calls the thread, "How Twitter Rigged the COVID Debate."
Nicholas Fondacaro of the Media Research Center (MRC) recalls that the Trump White House started the collaboration, pressuring Twitter and other social media platforms to throttle posts about runs on grocery and other stores at the beginning of the pandemic. Then the Biden White House upped the ante, censoring anything that did not support COVID-related mandates, lockdowns, and/or vaccines.
"They were suppressing official opinions from medical professionals, doctors, [and] other researchers," Fondacaro relays.
It has since been revealed that the White House and Twitter executives conspired to even censor peer-reviewed scientific studies that called the favored narrative into quesiton. Meanwhile, actual misinformation that supported the government got a free pass.
"There was one tweet that's given as an example, where somebody claims in 2021 COVID was one of the leading causes of death in children, which is completely not true," the MRC spokesman notes. "That was not marked as misinformation.
Fondacaro points out that while censoring free speech about elections, Donald Trump, or January 6th may have been unconstitutional, censoring COVID information may have been deadly. From the start, questions were raised about the safety of the shots that are now known to cause heart problems or death in some cases.
"It definitely may have changed people's opinions about getting [the shots] or not," says Fondacaro. "Some people, if they had seen all the information, I would assume that some people would choose not to get the vaccine."
AFN has reported that the first seven Twitter Files detailed an incestuous relationship between Twitter and the Justice Department to squash the Hunter Biden laptop story before and after the 2020 election, to censor and shadow-ban specific accounts, to counter what the Justice Department claims is "election misinformation," and to track and prosecute January 6th rioters.
Twitter Files #8 showed the U.S. Department of Defense in bed with Twitter executives to assist with PsyOps campaigns and spread propaganda in foreign countries. Part nine unveiled the "vast web of coordination between tech giant and CIA, State Department, [and] other agencies."
Musk has said the impetus for the original tweet thread was about what happened in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election and "how much government influence was there."
