Twitter Files: New details on Stanford group's push for censorship on COVID and vaccines

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Newly released internal Twitter communications provide details about the platform's communications with an academic project that advocated censoring topics deemed COVID-19-related misinformation during the pandemic.

The social platform agreed to receive communications from the Virality Project, a Stanford-based coalition of researchers and analysts who advocated online censorship of certain claims and narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The communications, as revealed Friday through internal emails provided by Twitter under the ownership of Elon Musk to journalist Matt Taibbi, included discussions of the "vaccine passport narrative," a reference to fears that apps used to verify vaccination status could limit freedoms.

The discussions about the passports, the project alleged, "have driven a larger anti-vaccination narrative about the loss of rights and freedoms." Many of these emails appeared to inform Twitter's policies on the subject, including the echoing of the language used by the project in its briefings.

The Virality Project also said it was "honing in" on an "increasingly popular narrative about natural immunity" in a June 2021 email, a reference to people developing immunity through exposure to COVID-19 rather than vaccines.

Twitter was one of six social platforms that partnered with the project to manage communications deemed misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Taibbi described the project's collaboration with Twitter as an "Orwellian proof-of-concept" of government, academics, and corporations working together to "control political messaging."

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," according to its website.

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Taibbi testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on March 9, where he defended his work on the Twitter Files and elaborated on the government's relationship with Twitter.

The Twitter Files have been a series of reports released by Taibbi and other journalists who were given access to Twitter's personal communication. The reports have detailed the company's decision-making process around Hunter Biden's laptop, the Jan. 8 banning of former President Donald Trump, and its relationship with federal agencies such as the FBI.

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Tags: Twitter, News, Misinformation, Coronavirus, Big Tech

Original Author: Christopher Hutton

Original Location: Twitter Files: New details on Stanford group's push for censorship on COVID and vaccines