News/Commentary

‘The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine’: Matt Taibbi’s latest Twitter Files dump delves into pandemic censorship

March 17, 2023 | | Print Article

Journalist Matt Taibbi has dropped the “Twitter Files,” part 19 which is a lengthy look into Twitter’s communications with a Stanford-based coalition of researchers and analysts called the Virality Project who advocated for the censorship of so-called COVID misinformation.

Taibbi called the thread, “The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine, Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of ‘True Stories.’”

Internal emails included discussions of the “vaccine passport narrative,” a reference to fears that apps were being used to verify vaccination status and could limit freedoms in places such as New York City as well as other big leftist enclaves.

The project contended that the discussions about passports “have driven a larger anti-vaccination narrative about the loss of rights and freedoms.” Many of these emails appeared to formulate Twitter’s policies on the subject, including the echoing of the language that was used by the project in its briefings.

The release of Dr. Fauci’s 2020 emails, reports of vaccinated individuals contracting COVID despite being vaccinated, natural immunity, suggesting COVID was “leaked from a lab,” and “worrisome jokes” were classified as potential misinformation and recommended for censorship by the Virality Project.

The Virality Project also claimed to be “honing in” on an “increasingly popular narrative about natural immunity” in a June 2021 email. That appears to be a reference to people developing immunity through exposure to COVID.

Twitter was one of seven social media platforms that partnered with the project over what they labeled as misinformation during the pandemic.

Taibbi called the Virality Project’s collaboration with Twitter an “Orwellian proof-of-concept” of government, academics, and corporations working together to “control political messaging.”

And all of this started right after President Biden took office. Twitter veterans Yoel Roth and Brian Clarke were predictably all in for the program, it would seem.

The Virality Project evidently wanted to worm its way into every social media platform out there including Gab, Parler, Telegram, and Gettr with an end game of “near-total surveillance of the social media landscape.”

There is much, much more to the thread that can be found here.

According to its website, the Virality Project is a “coalition of research entities focused on supporting real-time information exchange between the research community, public health officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, and social media platforms.”

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