TheRedAlertNews.com) – Twitter’s owner Elon Musk has released more internal documents from the “Twitter Files” revealing Big Pharma and COVID-19 vaccine makers used the platform for censorship and spreading misinformation.
The Intercept journalist Lee Fang published the new batch of Twitter Files.
It shows that Twitter’s former owners allowed the biggest pharmaceutical companies to smear their competitors by spreading misinformation while the producers of COVID-19 vaccines pressured the platform to censor alternative views.
In his report based on the newly leaked materials, Fang said Big Pharma took advantage of Twitter’s former censorship to beat down smaller competitors, which could hurt the highly profitable business with coronavirus vaccines.
“Global drug giants saw the crisis as an opportunity for unprecedented profit. Behind closed doors, pharma launched a massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new covid-related medicine, including therapeutics and vaccines,” Fang explained.
He revealed that Germany-based company BioNTech, which developed Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, asked Twitter to censor uses demanding generic low-cost vaccines.
The new files also prove Twitter took no action to stop Big Pharma lobbyists from making exaggerated claims that easing intellectual property regulations would cost lots of money.
“Notably, this massive push to censor and label covid misinfo never applied to drug companies,” Fang noted.
“When big pharma wildly exaggerated the risks of creating low-cost generic covid vaccines, Stronger [the pharmaceutical industry’s content moderation project] did nothing. The rules applied only to critics of industry,” the journalist elaborated.
“The push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries,” he added.
The journalist emphasized that Big Pharma’s COVID-19 vaccine lobbyism onslaught became after President Joe Biden’s election to the White House.
“BIO, the lobby group that represents biopharma, including Moderna & Pfizer [contacted the new administration] demanding the U.S. gov sanction any country attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost covid medicine or vaccines,” Fang wrote.
He revealed further that Twitter, in particular, was quick to respond to BioNTech’s censorship request, which Germany’s government also supported.
A Twitter lobbyist in Europe, Nina Morschhaeuser, asked the company’s content moderation team to monitor accounts mentioning Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine.
“We got contacted by Biontech as well as the German Federal Office for Information Security for an online campaign targeting the pharmaceutical companies developing the COVID-19 vaccine,” Morschhaeuser wrote a company email in December 2020.
“Expected hashtags include #JoinCTAP and #PeoplesVaccine. The authorities are warning about ‘serious consequences’ of the action, i.e. posts and a flood of comments ‘that may violate TOS’ as well the ‘takeover of user accounts’ are to be expected,” she added.
A Pfizer/Moderna-funded campaign on behalf of the BIO group included regular direct emails with lists of tweets to take down and accounts to verify.
Elon Musk’s Twitter released another batch of internal discussions, which revealed how the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to reinforce their own narratives and censor the public conversation around coronavirus vaccines and vaccine policies. https://t.co/aep3IxwxLm
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) January 16, 2023
