Twitter Files: The ‘Great Covid-19 Lie Machine’ Worked to Censor ‘True Stories’

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 14: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of A
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Alana Mastrangelo

In the latest Twitter Files report published on Friday, journalist and author Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter partnered with the Virality Project, which warned the social media platform that “true stories that could fuel hesitancy,” complained that “anti-vaccine” accounts were retweeting the CDC, and ironically ran searches for the term “surveillance state” while looking for more information to censor.

“The release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s spring 2020 emails via the Freedom of Information Act has been used to exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci,” the Virality Project lamented in June 2021.

MADRID, SPAIN - SEPTEMBER 26: A nurse vaccinates an elderly man with the Modern dose during the start of the administration of the fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to users and social-healthcare workers in nursing homes, at the Vallecas public nursing home for the elderly, on 26 September, 2022 in Madrid, Spain. The Community of Madrid has begun to administer the fourth dose against Covid-19 to people admitted to 733 residential centers in the region who are over 80 years of age, based on vulnerability criteria. The Ministry of Health will have 44 million doses of vaccines adapted to variants against Covid-19, which will be distributed among the Autonomous Communities. (Photo By Alejandro Martinez Velez/Europa Press via Getty Images)

A nurse vaccinates an elderly man with the Moderna vaccine (Photo By Alejandro Martinez Velez/Europa Press via Getty Images)

The Virality Project is “a sweeping, cross-platform effort to monitor billons of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies, and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs,” Taibbi noted.

Taibbi went on to say that Friday’s Twitter Files revealed “Reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway,” “natural immunity,” suggesting Covid-19 “leaked from a lab,” and even “worrisome jokes” were all characterized as “potential violations” or disinformation “events” by the Virality Project.

“We’ve since learned the Virality Project in 2021 worked with government to launch a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content,” Taibbi said. “At least six major Internet platforms were ‘onboarded’ to the same JIRA ticketing system, daily sending millions of items for review.”

The journalist added that the Virality Project had “knowingly targeted true material and legitimate political opinion, while often being factually wrong itself.”

“As Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success,” he said. “Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.”

The Virality Project had also “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,” Taibbi said.

The Twitter Files also revealed that on February 5, 2021, right after President Joe Biden took office, Stanford wrote to Twitter to discuss the Virality Project. Shortly after that, Twitter agreed to receive weekly reports on “anti-vax disinformation.”

The Virality Project also warned Twitter that “true stories that could fuel hesitancy,” including stories such as “celebrity deaths after vaccine,” as well as the closure of a central New York school due to reports of post-vaccine illness.

The organization suggested that stories like these be considered “Standard Vaccine Misinformation on Your Platform.”

In one email to Twitter, the Virality Project mentioned what it called the “vaccine passport narrative,” saying “concerns” over such programs “have driven a larger anti-vaccination narrative about the loss of rights and freedoms.”

The organization also framed this as a misinformation “event.”

The Virality Project routinely framed real testimonials about vaccine side effects as misinformation — from “true stories” of blood clots from AstraZeneca vaccines, to a New York Times story about vaccine recipients who contracted the blood disorder thrombocytopenia, Taibbi said.

The Virality Project also warned against people “just asking questions,” suggesting it was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.”

Twitter employees eventually mimicked Virality Project language, describing “campaigns against vaccine passports,” “fear of mandatory immunizations,” and “misuse of official reporting tools” as “potential violations.”

“While this account posts legitimate and accurate COVID-19 updates — it posts content that attacks Italian politicians, the EU, and the United States,” the Global Engagement Center complained to Twitter in an email.

The Twitter Files also reveal an email in which the Virality Project implored Twitter to “hone in” on an “increasingly popular narrative about natural immunity.”

But the organization was “repeatedly, extravagantly wrong,” Taibbi said, noting one example in April 2021, when the Virality Project mistakenly described “breakthrough” infections as “extremely rare events” that should not be inferred to mean “vaccines are ineffective.”

Later, after the CDC changed its methodology for counting cases of the Chinese coronavirus among vaccinated people to only include those resulting in hospitalization or death, the Virality Project complained that “anti-vaccine” accounts were retweeting the information.

Finally, in an amusing yet chilling case of irony, the Twitter Files also revealed that the Virality Project ran searches for the term “surveillance state.”

A year later, the organization issued a report calling for a “rumor-control mechanism to address nationally trending narratives,” and a “Misinformation and Disinformation Center of Excellence” to be housed within CISA, at the Department of Homeland Security.

And one day later, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas infamously announced that a “Disinformation Governance Board” had been created, and that it was to be led by censor Nina Jankowicz.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.

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