Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, many theorized matters of corruption between government agencies and corporate lobbyists have become known.
Speculations that would have gotten you suspended from social media a year ago for being fake news are now being revealed to be true. Although the mainstream media at large is not actively reporting on these revelations, the information is still out there.
The latest drop comes from investigative journalist Lee Fang who published a series of threads on Twitter that show the lobbying group Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), funded by Pfizer and Moderna, paid $1,275,000 to The Public Good Projects to create a content moderation campaign that influenced Twitter’s Covid misinformation policy.
While we have long suspected collusion between big pharma and social media, you can see below in released documents that they did indeed conspire to manipulate public opinion and government policy regarding covid vaccinations, passports, and suppression of generic vaccines to fight covid19.
Below are the releases from Lee Fang:
1. New piece from the TWITTER FILES.
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy.
The push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries.
2. In 2020, it was clear that the pandemic would require rapid innovation. Early on, there was a push to make the solution equitable: an international partnership to share ideas, technology, new forms of medicine to rapidly solve this crisis. https://t.co/L4QNcCCzCE
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
3. But 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.
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
4. BIO, the lobby group that represents biopharma, including Moderna & Pfizer, wrote to the newly elected Biden admin, demanding the U.S. gov sanction any country attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost covid medicine or vaccines. https://t.co/EOX8HoYD46
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
5. That brings us to Twitter. The global lobbying blitz includes direct pressure on social media. BioNTech, which developed Pfizer's vaccine, reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines. pic.twitter.com/6cVIRcUDZV
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
6. Twitter's reps responded quickly to the pharma request, which was also backed by the German government. A lobbyist in Europe asked the content moderation team to monitor the accounts of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & of activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine pic.twitter.com/Bt9YNJUlN1
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
7. The potential "fake accounts" that Twitter monitored for protesting Pfizer? These were real people. Here's one the Twitter team flagged for potential terms of use violations. I talked to Terry, a 74 year old retired bricklayer in the UK on the phone. https://t.co/qIH0Tngsm1
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
10. BIO provided $1,275,000 to the campaign, part of which is revealed through tax forms. The PGP campaign, called "Stronger," helped Twitter create content moderation bots, select which public health accounts got verification, helped crowdsource content takedowns. pic.twitter.com/emWC2Dmg3E
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
12. The Moderna/Pfizer-funded campaign included direct regular emails with lists of tweets to takedown & others to verify. Here's an example of those types of emails that went straight to Twitter's lobbyists and content moderators. Many focused on @zerohedge, which was suspended. pic.twitter.com/wNPPx1IiRD
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
14. Here is my reported piece w/more detail. I was given some access to Twitter emails. I signed/agreed to nothing, Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by a Twitter attorney, so what I saw could be limited. https://t.co/McEaKZ2MKX
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
