Dem Rep Deletes Tweet Following Fact-Check on ‘Twitter Files’

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) deleted a tweet about the “Twitter Files” after being fact-checked. Twitter user Ian Miles Cheong shared a screenshot of the since-deleted tweet posted by Lieu. “Dear : The tweet you cite is in…

Savannah RychcikDec 27, 20223 min read

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https://Twitter.com/whowatwherewolf/status/1607688339272134656

On Monday, it was reported that Independent writer David Zweig went viral for his reporting on behalf of Bari Weiss’s publication, The Free Press, about how the government handled content about the COVID-19 pandemic on social media platforms.

Zweig reported the government “pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.”

He added, “Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.”

The “Twitter Files” pointed out when President Joe Biden entered the White House, “One of the first meeting quests from the Biden White House was about COVID misinformation” and Biden’s staff “focused on vaccines and hight profile anti-vaxxer accounts, including Alex Berenson,” as Fox News noted.

A memo written by Twitter’s head of U.S. public policy Lauren Culbertson claims the Biden administration was “not satisfied with Twitter’s enforcement approach as they wanted Twitter to do more and to de-platform several accounts.”

Zweig reported that Culbertson wrote, “Because of this dissatisfaction, we were asked to join other calls. They were very angry in nature.”

He explained, “Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed employees often debating moderation cases in great detail, and with more care than was shown by the government toward free speech. But Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.”

Additionally, it was reported that the Trump administration held “weekly” calls with other companies including Google, Facebook and Microsoft to discuss “general trends” that were taking place on other platforms.