Private-federal censorship machine targeted TRUE ‘misinformation’
New York PostMar 18, 2023
The Facts
In the latest "Twitter Files" — reporting on internal emails from the social media giant during COVID — investigative journalist Matt Taibbi focused on Stanford University’s Virality Project — a federally-funded initiative aimed at "detecting and mitigating the impact of false and misleading narratives related to COVID-19 vaccines."
However, Taibbi's findings showed that the Virality Project encouraged Twitter to censor "stories of true vaccine side effects" and "true posts which could fuel [vaccine] hesitancy."
The Spin
Right narrative
This story is a scandal and as Orwellian as it gets. During a time when accurate information was most badly needed, tax-payer money was going to a project which worked with all the major social media platforms to control political messaging and censor content that was knowingly true at the time, or has since shown to be accurate. Is there any regard for speech and the Constitution?
Left narrative
Matt Taibbi's so-called "investigative journalism" has been widely criticized by Democrats and for good reason. Taibbi has been directly commissioned by Elon Musk for what are often biased and out-of-context "doxx and dump" stories to further Musk's right-leaning agenda. The grossly subjective so-called "Twitter Files" must be viewed in this light.