Regime of Censorship, continued
Fabricated consensus
We continue with the censorship Timeline, focusing on U.S. Federal Government agencies policing Twitter to censor posts that authorities dislike.
Alex Berenson was banned from Twitter for a post reporting that natural immunity is superior to the covid-vax in preventing infection. The Timeline below strongly suggests that this ban was applied pursuant to a request by Pfizer CEO Bourla to Joe Biden, relayed through Scott Gottleib, acting in two conflicting capacities as both FDA Commissioner and Pfizer Board Member. Alex Berenson writes: 'The Missouri documents, along with some obtained through discovery in Berenson v. Twitter, and a FOIA request by America First Legal, expose the extent of the administration’s appropriation of big tech to effect a vast and unprecedented regime of viewpoint-based censorship on the information that most Americans see, hear and otherwise consume. At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government officials, have been explicitly directing social media companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that violate the government’s own preferences and guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.’
One major purpose of the Federal Government's censorship regime is to manufacture the appearance of consensus by silencing any voices that do not echo its party line of the moment. Dr Aaron Kheriarty notes this kind of censorship has a multiplier effect through self-censorship by people trying to anticipate what they will be sanctioned for. Thus the censorship regime is most effective when vague, pushing people to the widest possible interpretation of what might be forbidden:
Aaron Kheriarty notes: 'And then there are the consequent downstream adverse effects of this kind of censorship — not only on those who are directly censored but on other users of the platform who self-censor to avoid similar punishments. Most concerningly, readers are deprived of access to contrasting information or open debate from which to inform their viewpoints, leading to the false impression of a scientific 'consensus' when no such consensus exists.' || Source
Censorship is the polar opposite of a legal regime, which is based on predictibility -- reasonable advance knowledge of what speech, writing, or behavior is or is not forbidden. Unpredictibility being the essential feature reveals censorship going well beyond free speech, encompassing total control through arbitrary edict. It's amusing to watch Twitter, Facebook, and other social media struggle to find or develop well-defined rules for exactly what speech they are supposed to censor, because they never get it that the whole point of censorship is to exercise arbitrary power -- over them, and though them, over the entire population.
April 9, 2021: White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty instructs Facebook to make sure whatever censorship algorithms they're using have the desired effect: 'I'm really mostly interested in what effects the interventions and products [algorithmic censorship methods] you've tested have had on increasing vaccine interest within hesitant communities, and which ones have shown promise. Really couldn't care less about products unless they're having measurable impact. And while the product safari has been interesting, at the end of the day, I care mostly about what actions and changes you're making to ensure sure [sic] you're not making our country's vaccine hesitancy problem worse. I have a... list of products you're building but I still don't have a good, empirical answer on how effective you've been at reducing the spread of vaccine-skeptical content and misinformation to vaccine fence sitters in the now-folded 'lockdown'. || Source
Note the tone of contempt in the summary dismissal of Facebook's prior submissions as a 'safari' of products, despite the company's best efforts to be servile in accommodating the Government's censorship requests. Don't you wish you could talk to your software suppliers that way? Instead of waiting on hold for 45 minutes to get to a menu of irrelevant options, and finally to be connected to an alleged human being who is equally clueless. How awesome to have a direct pipeline to a software supplier you can order around who can actually get things done. What a wonderful world it would be if you, an ordinary user, could issue commands like Flaherty's to fix the damn problem no matter how.
Flaherty and his boss haven't the slightest interest in whether the vaccines really don't work, per Tucker Carlson's broadcast. And they don't care about Facebook's flailing efforts to establish some intellectually defensible consistency for its censorship efforts. They just don't want to hear or see anything more on Facebook about vaccines not working, or causing heart attacks, or anything whatsoever that might cause people to refuse mRNA injections. Intellectual consistency on censorship is the opposite of this regime is after.
April 14, 2021: White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty tells Facebook to censor Fox News' Tucker Carlson for reporting 'vaccines don't work'. Facebook had previously set forth its censorship policies as including 'reducing posts' distriubtion, not suggesting posts to users, limiting their discoverability in Search, and applying Inform Labels and/or reshare friction to the posts'. These techniques of censorship are applied to posts that 'may contribute to vaccine hesitancy or present a barrier to vaccination', even if they 'do not violate our Misinformation and Harm policy'. Flaherty complains this isn't enough censorship for the Biden White House: 'This is exactly why I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like—if ‘reduction’ means ‘pumping our most vaccine hesitant audience with [T]ucker Carlson saying it doesn’t work’ then … I’m not sure it’s reduction!' The unknown Facebook employee scurries to reassure Flaherty 'Running this down now'. || Source
Interestingly Flaherty then links vaccine refusal to the apparently unrelated issue of the dubious 2020 election. In the White House worldview, everything they object to is related. The contrast between Facebook's carefully crafted algorithmic rules and the emotional cohesion connecting the slightest hints of regime opposition couldn't be greater. Facebook's censorship performance on vaccine efficacy being not up to snuff dates back to its election censorship peformance, which in Flaherty's view was not diligent enough. It's almost as if Biden et al are not grateful for Mark Zuckerberg's $350 million purchase of votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania (Timeline §9b. Hijacking the Presidency, June - October 2020). Note to Zuck: ‘Place not thy trust in princes’. — Psalms 146-3.
So, explicitly, in the same message where he's criticizing Facebook's vaccine news censorship performance, Flaherty tells Facebook to shape up so that it doesn't make the same mistakes it made in the 2020 election:
'In the electoral context, you tested and deployed an algorithmic shift that promoted quality news and information about the election.... You only did this, however, after an election that you helped increase skepticism in, and an insurrection [the Jan 6 false-flag incident and objection to 2020 election fraud] which was plotted, in large part, on your platform. And then you turned it back off. I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again'.
The Biden Admin here is instructing a purportedly private company, Facebook, in granular details of how to organize its business, exactly as if Facebook were a subordinate part of the White House executive apparatus.
The following week, the same Flaherty is incensed about the ghosts of removed YouTube videos still referencing antivax messages. He informs YouTube parent Google, with a cc to WHO (attaboy, Rob!) that merely removing offensive videos isn't good enough for this White House. 'We remain concerned that YouTube is 'funneling' people into [vaccine] hesitance and intensifying people's hesitancy.... We want to be sure you have a handle on vaccine hesitancy and are working toward making the problem better [solving the problem, he probably means to say]. This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH'.
Surely that concern is that of none other than the 'Big Guy' himself, the name Hunter used to identify his Dad as the recipient of 10 percent of a Chinese bribery/extortion scheme. There seems to be a lot of hesitancy going around, not only about vaccines, but about uttering the name of Joe Biden, as if bad things might happen to those who do. Erstwhile Biden family business partner Bobulinski had also been warned explicitly not to mention Joe Biden by name. And the Wilmington computer-shop owner to whom Hunter Biden had repaired for revival of his water-logged Mac computer was also warned by FBI agents that 'it is our experience that nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things'. || Source at Dec 2019. Or perhaps the no-name policy is thought to provide plausible deniability of criminal behavior. Regardless, Flaherty is clearly ordering YouTube and Google to do whatever it takes to remove ghost referrals as well as censored content.
'In July 2021, Twitter's censorship efforts took on a new urgency', Alex Berenson writes. 'The reason was simple. The vaccines had begun to fail, much more quickly the public had been told to expect. In Israel, the first country to complete a mass vaccination campaign with Pfizer’s mRNA shot, infections soared. Hospitalizations and deaths rapidly followed. The Biden Administration and Pfizer began preparing vaccinated people to take a third mRNA 'booster' dose, despite a lack of clinical trial data on the safety or effectiveness of a booster. The administration also began to consider imposing politically divisive employment- and education-related vaccine mandates, despite earlier promises it would not. So silencing vaccine skeptics became a top priority - for the White House and Pfizer. No one was more skeptical, or had a larger audience, than I did’. || Source
July 2021: U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy releases a 22-page advisory concerning what the World Health Organization referred to as an 'infodemic', and calls on social media platforms to do more to shut down 'misformation. We are asking them to step up. We can’t wait longer for them to take aggressive action'.
Berenson writes that his 'fourth strike [one-week lockout] clearly was invalid under Twitter’s own policies - it was a simple statement of fact about Pfizer’s clinical trial results. By imposing the strike, Twitter was essentially arguing it could take action against me at any time for any reason'. || Source
Berenson is getting to the heart of the matter here as he approaches realization of the fact that censorship can *only* have arbitrary rules, or no rules at all.
One of the Biden administration’s first meeting requests was about Covid, with a focus on 'anti-vaxxer accounts,' according to a meeting summary by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy.
July 16, 2021: Biden says social media companies were 'killing people' by allowing dissenters to raise questions about the mRNA shots. This wild accusation upsets many social media executives, goading them into a frantic search for ways to appease the 'Big Guy's' wrath.
July 28, 2021: Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla meets with Biden at White House.
July 30, 2021: Twitter locks Alex Berenson out of his account. This is the last step before a permanent ban.
The timing suggests that Twitter's banning and silencing Berenson was probably discussed by Bourla and Biden at their meeting two days earlier.
Aug 2021: Gottleib and others demand in writing that colleges and universities require students and staff to take mRNA injections.
As a captive audience college students would provide 'fresh meat' to supplement the flagging vax 'uptake'.
Aug 2021: Dr Jay Bhattacharya joins Twitter, posts the Nov 2020 Great Barrington Declaration advocating 'focused protection' rather than universal vaccination. Bhattacharya, a respected Professor of Medicine at Stanford, had also suggested that lockdowns and school closings harm children, depriving them of both in-person education and social contact. Twitter immediately places him on a secret 'Trends Blacklist' to ensure that his posts would not be widely disseminated.
Aug 25, 2021: Dr Martin Kulldorf writes on Twitter that 'In Israel, vaccinated individuals had 27 times higher risk of systematic covid infection compared to those with natural immunity from prior covid disease.' Twitter censors this by disallowing likes and shares, one of its many 'visibility filtering' techniques.
Aug 27, 2021: FDA Commissioner and Pfizer Board member Scott Gottleib (a prima facie conflict-of-interest) asks Twitter in a secret meeting to ban former NYTimes science writer Alex Berenson permanently. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 in 2021. Pfizer was paid $40 billion for its mRNA injections in 2021. Berenson had posted a tweet based on research by Dr Brett Giroir, a physician who was briefly FDA head. The tweet explained correctly that natural immunity after Covid infection was superior to vaccine protection, and urged the Biden Admin therefore to exempt people with natural immunity from forced-vaxing that was planned. Despite Giroir's suggesting that others should 'Go get vaccinated!', the tweet incurred Gottleib's disapprobation because it might indicate some people don't need the covid-vax, and could thereby raise questions about the shots. Gottlieb advised Twitter lobbyist Todd O’Boyle that the tweet was 'corrosive, and could end up going viral and driving news coverage'. O'Doyle sent this characterization to Twitter's 'Strategic Response' team as coming from a former FDA Commissioner, omitting the fact that Gottleib was also a Pfizer Board member. A Strategic Response analyst quickly found the tweet did not violate any of the company’s misinformation rules. Yet Twitter tagged it in a way that severely restricted its distribution. || Source
Aug 28, 2021: Twitter bans Berenson permanently, claiming he had violated its rules on Covid misinformation.
Sept 3, 2021: FDA Commissioner and Pfizer Board member Scott Gottleib sends a complaint to Twitter Lobbyist O'Doyle about a tweet from Dr Justin Hart about the harmful effect on children of missing school despite a near-zero risk of covid mortality. Pfizer was then seeking approval of covid-vaxing school children aged five to 11. Twitter does not sanction Hart's tweet.
Dec 2021: Berenson sues Twitter in SF Federal District Court.
April 28, 2022: Twitter bans physician for citing peer-reviewed study that found mRNA vaccines cause not only myocarditis, but also cardiac arrests in the 16-to-39-year-old age group in Israel.
April 28, 2022: Twitter bans Dr Andrew Bostom for citing CDC data showing influenza is more lethal than covid in children, and that the covid-vax causes more life-threatening conditions than influenza does in children. The ban occurs while officials are promoting covid-vaxing of children and asserting it is less risky than influenza.
July 2022: Twitter settles Berenson lawsuit, admitting wrongdoing in censoring him.