Ironically, the president who was cheated out of a second term and went on to found a ‘free speech’ platform — Truth Social — was himself responsible, to a degree, for online censorship of COVID-19 information during the pandemic, according to the latest Twitter Files dump.
While presidents often do not know what is going on every day of the week in every one of the more than 430 federal agencies under control of the Executive Branch, it is safe to assume that Trump — an avid Twitter user at the time — would have been told whether anyone in his administration was meeting with social media platforms to discuss censorship of ‘competing’ COVID information.
So it comes as somewhat of a surprise that the latest dump of files shows that Trump administration officials worked with Twitter to throttle information that the ‘regime’ did not want Americans to know about.
“The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic. Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes,” reporter David Zweig noted in a column at the Free Press published this week.
Zweig’s report was based on data he was shown after being invited to fly out to San Francisco from New York to view what Twitter boss Elon Musk wanted him to see: That both administrations are guilty of information suppression which they justified by claiming they were just combatting misinformation.
“At the onset of the pandemic, the Trump administration was especially concerned about panic buying, and sought ‘help from the tech companies to combat misinformation,’ according to emails sent by Twitter employees in the wake of meetings with the White House,” his report continued. “One area of so-called misinformation: ‘runs on grocery stores.’ The trouble is that it wasn’t misinformation: There actually were runs on goods.
“And it wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others,” he added.
After the Democrat-leaning deep state robbed Trump of his reelection and installed Joe Biden in the Oval Office, the new regime made it very plain very early on Americans: “Be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe,” Zweig wrote.
Mind you, by the time Biden got into office, the country was a year into the pandemic and the vaccine roll-out was already well underway — meaning the country was already on the downhill side of things. But because Democrats are tyrants and control freaks, the plan became, ‘Let’s clamp down harder.’ And that is the message that the regime took to Twitter and the other social media companies, Zweig noted, citing the information he was shown.
“They were especially concerned about Alex Berenson, a journalist skeptical of lockdowns and mRNA vaccines, who had hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform,” he wrote.
Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and certainly no crackpot, would later be banned from Twitter for daring to post COVID information that ran counter to the regime’s pandemic propaganda.
“By the summer of 2021…Biden announced publicly that social media companies were ‘killing people’ by allowing misinformation about vaccines. Just hours later, Twitter locked Berenson out of his account, and then permanently suspended him the next month. Berenson sued Twitter. He ultimately settled with the company, and is now back on the platform,” Zweig wrote.
He went on to note that while Twitter did not act on all of the Biden regime’s demands for censorship, “Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted,” he wrote.
Musk has done the country a huge public service by purchasing Twitter and revealing what that company — and, very likely, the other social media majors — was doing for years: Shaping narratives on behalf of big government.