Elon Musk, who has started to share Twitter’s secret files one by one in recent weeks, has come up with a new one. The subject of Musk’s disclosure files this time was Twitter’s policy at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak.
New information shared via David Zweig showed that Twitter is largely hand-managing the COVID-19 discussions. Even if it was true, Twitter censored information against the US administration, discredited doctors and experts who opposed it, and even silenced ordinary users who shared official data.
COVID content on Twitter was edited at the request of US presidents:
“The internal files I reviewed while on Twitter for The Free Press showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations were directly pressing Twitter executives to tailor the platform’s pandemic content to their liking.”
Moreover, not only Twitter, but also Google, Facebook, Microsoft and much more were involved:
Twitter documents showed that platforms acting under pressure from the US government are not limited to Twitter alone. It was officially documented that Google, Facebook, Microsoft and various other technology companies attended the meetings organized by the management.
Twitter’s content moderation was also not very healthy:
- A query tree that Twitter provides to third-party users to make decisions about Tweets.
While content moderation on Twitter is usually done by artificial intelligence, in some countries, such as the Philippines, this moderation was the responsibility of third parties. However, these people were also moderating on issues where their expertise was not enough, and inevitably destroyed many health debates from the very beginning.
An example: An expert’s opinion on the vaccine controversy was directly censored:
The above tweet shared by Martin Kulldorf of Harvard Medical School met with a direct action by the Twitter management. Kulldorf suggested in his tweet that the vaccine is especially important for individuals in the high-risk category, and those exposed to natural infection do not need the vaccine.
Twitter management, on the other hand, ruled that this Tweet violated the misinformation policies about COVID-19. It was stated that the opinion is against the guidelines of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The tweet was subsequently tagged as ‘misleading’.
But even opinions that ran parallel to the CDC were censored:
Twitter’s bots responsible for content moderation also labeled Tweets that included direct CDC data from time to time as ‘misleading’.
Moreover, some of the banned Tweets were responses to Tweets containing genuine misinformation. However, Tweets that presented the correct data instead of the main Tweets were labeled as ‘misleading’.
Further disclosures will follow next week:
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, who is preparing to say goodbye to the CEO, announced that other details on the subject will be shared with experts next week.
It is still unclear whether Twitter’s disclosure files will lead to official investigations.
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