Click on the link to X below to see the whole thing.
In July 2021, a senior Pfizer board member secretly began working with a Biden Administration operative to suppress criticism of Covid vaccines on X, newly released internal documents from X show.
Top officials at Twitter (now X) viewed the men – Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the Pfizer director, and Andy Slavitt, the operative, who had officially left a senior White House post just weeks before – as speaking for the administration in their censorship demands, the documents show.
The new documents raise constitutional and legal concerns about the Biden Administration’s social media censorship efforts, as well as Pfizer’s role in banning criticism of a product that made up almost half its sales in 2021.
Within days, the Supreme Court is expected to decide Murthy v Missouri, a landmark lawsuit over the administration’s efforts to control debate on social media.
The new documents provide crucial perspective on the Missouri case, showing how far would-be censors went in 2021 to prop up public confidence in the Covid jabs. The documents also show the power the White House had over Twitter, which badly wanted to avoid a confrontation with it.
At the time, the Biden Administration was threatening to “review” a federal law commonly called Section 230, because it was angry social media companies were allowing Covid vaccine skepticism.
Section 230 was crucial to those companies for the near-total immunity it gave them against lawsuits from users. Twitter took threats to it seriously. “We will always be proactive and vigilant about protecting 230,” Lauren Culbertson, the company’s then-head of United States public policy, wrote on July 22, 2021.
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None of these internal documents has been previously released.
They are part of a tranche of censorship-related material X is making available to me following searches of its internal archives.
Lawyers for X are reviewing the documents before releasing them. But so far only one document they have provided – an email from Jim Baker, Twitter’s then-deputy general counsel – contains any redactions.
In addition, no one at X, including Elon Musk, asked for or placed any restrictions on or had any input into the writing of this article. (Lawyers for X did ask to review it after writing but before publication, to be sure the names of junior employees or their email addresses were not included. Their review did not result in any changes.)
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The censorship conspiracy by Slavitt and Gottlieb targeted me personally.
I am not named in any of the new documents provided so far. Slavitt and Gottlieb used careful – almost coded – language in their outreach to Twitter on July 18 and 19, 2021. They did initially not refer to any particular censorship targets by name. But emails and other internal Twitter documents that have already been released show I was a top target of both men.
, my complaint against Slavitt, Gottlieb, Pfizer chairman Dr. Albert Bourla, and the Biden Administration for conspiring to force Twitter to ban me in 2021. Gottlieb’s lawyers previously argued I had not alleged Gottlieb had had any contact with Twitter officials before August 2021. The documents show otherwise.
In fact, Slavitt introduced Gottlieb to Todd O’Boyle – a senior Twitter lobbyist who handled most of the company’s interactions with the White House – by email on Sunday, July 18, 2021. Slavitt, a longtime Democratic operative, had served as senior advisor to the Biden administration’s Covid response team.
“I wonder if you would be open to a 20 minute call with Scott Gottlieb and me about a policy matter,” Slavitt wrote. Slavitt referred to Gottlieb as “FDA commissioner under Trump” and failed to mention his role on Pfizer’s board.
Although he had officially left the Biden Administration weeks before, Slavitt’s email signature also contained his White House email address, asking that “Government Email” be sent there.
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Delusions of Adequacy 