TWITTER FILE #19 The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of “True Stories”
Twitter Files #19: The Great COVID-19 Lie Machine, Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of “True Stories”
(Matt Taibbi - 013/17/2023)
Twitter File #19: It is truly Orwellian what levels the powers that be went to in order to suppress truths about all things COVID. In Twitter File #19, Mr. Taibbi discloses how certain factions (government, academia, social media) worked together to suppress the truth as it relates to natural immunity, theories that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab, vaccine injury (the risk of myocarditis for vaccinated teens, blood clots [AstraZeneca] and thrombocytopenia, Guillain-Barre Syndrome) and even “worrisome jokes”(1) by labelling them as “potential violations” or disinformation related to the topics of with a worry that it was exacerbating a distrust of Fauci. Imagine that!
Virality Project, an outfit that was monitoring social media referred to “the myocarditis situation, Senator Paul Rand’s claims about natural immunity, and serious side effects (including the re-emerging concern about Guillain-Barre Syndrome)”(1). Virality Project monitored posts with the assistance of universities such as Stanford University, UW, and NYU, as well as federal agencies for alleged anti-vax “disinformation” using a notification system called JIRA. This began in February 2021.
Virality Project, which worked closetly with the government, went so far as to label actual, true stories of COVID vaccine side effects as “disinformation” and “malinformation” (what they call exaggeration or misleading comments) because they thought it would lead to vaccine hesitancy. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberg (who testified in front of the House Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of Federal Government last week), learned that Vitality Project monitored not only Twitter, but also Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pintrest for posts they then targeted for suppression because the posts did not fit their narrative. The goal was to suppress the truth in order to push the vaccine. As Taibbi writes:
“This story is important for two reasons. One, as Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success. Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging. Two, it accelerated the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.” (2), (3)
In March 2021, the monitoring expanded to Gab, Parler, Telegram, and Gettr. for “near-total surveillance" of the social media landscape.” (4) An email from a Stanford employee states that they were searching all the aforementioned social media platforms for misinformation and created “actionable themes.”(4) Weekly “reports” then went out to the involved platforms.
To Twitter’s credit, their standards for internal guidance required the post to be “demonstrably false,” however, “the Virality Project IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CDC, pushed for different standards.”(5) Specifically, Virality Project warned Twitter that “true stories (of vaccine injury, etc) could fuel hesitancy", meaning that true stories about celebrities who’d died following the vaccine or what ended up being a closure of a NY school because of reports of post-vaccine illnesses should be considered misinformation, despite these being actual events. They realized that these true stories were giving strength to the anti-vaccine message, especially as it relates to “loss of rights and freedoms.”(6) And then Virality Project went so far as to even encourage against people just posing questions about COVID or the vaccine as being the act of spreading of misinformation. So, you couldn’t even question anything COVID-related.
In April 2021, Virality Project encouraged describing “breakthrough” infections as “extremely rare events" instead of the increasing thought that the vaccines were ineffective. (7) As we know, within a few months, the CDC had to admit that breakthrough infections were not rare. As it turns out, the entire COVID and COVID vaccine narrative finally had too much information stacking up against it to continue the push, so it appears that Virality Projects efforts turned to fighting “election integrity misinformation.” They may still be winning that battle.
(1) https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1636729171995926528?s=20
(2) https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1636729185707122691?s=20
(3) https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1636729187716268035?s=20
(4) https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1636729194708074498?s=20
(5) https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1636729197707100162?s=20
(6) https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1636729203323273216?s=20
(7) https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1636729233027260419?s=20