Campaign funded by Pfizer and Moderna lobbyists sent Twitter weekly lists of tweets to censor
The Public Good Projects (PGP), a nonprofit that has developed several projects to fight so-called Covid misinformation, received $1,275,000 from the Pfizer and Moderna lobbying group, Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), to create a content moderation campaign that influenced Twitter s Covid misinformation rules. As part of this campaign, PGP sent Twitter lobbyists and content moderators weekly emails containing lists of tweets to censor.
Journalist Lee Fang published one of the weekly emails that Twitter received from PGP as part of the latest release of the Twitter Files collections of internal Twitter communications that have exposed the censorship relationships Twitter had with government agencies and other powerful groups before Elon Musk took over.
The email shows Todd O Boyle, a senior manager on Twitter s Public Policy team, sharing this week s misinfo report from PGP. The February 24, 2022 email included a list of top trends the PGP had seen during the week and two attached lists. According to Fang, one of the lists contained tweets the PGP wanted Twitter to take down and the other list contained tweets that it wanted Twitter to verify.
I hope some House committee can reveal the rest of the censorship regime the Big Tech has undertaken. And that’s just one of many steps that should and must be taken. We are clearly living in a country in which people do not have free access or exposure to information — to reality. I’m still trying to get my head around this increasingly obvious fact.
The Democrats have made themselves the party of censorship, of thought control. The GOP may have well done the same thing had they the opportunity. But the fact remains that it’s the Democrats who stepped into the role of attempting to manage what people were allowed to read, say and therefore allowed to think. At the highest level, this manipulation seems to have been motivated by the desire for power and money by our elected politician, various bureaucrats and big business. I must be more naïve than most people, because I find this just profoundly shocking. You expect a campaign ad to be skewed towards some candidate. You do not expect the whole infrastructure of internet socializing to be managed and massaged toward a particular end or in a particular direction. The only thing I can think of that compares to this situation is the domination of thought in pre-Enlightenment Europe where the RC Church or in England the Anglican church enforced its preferred world views upon everyone, except those crafty enough to somehow get around it. I devoutly hope this movement can be stopped and reversed, or we will have well and truly lost our country.