Biden White House and Big Disinformation Have Policies to Ban “True Content” on COVID Vaccines

How can social media companies police “vaccine misinformation” when Big Pharma is paying them hundreds of millions for advertising?

8 minute read

I’m giving a talk this weekend at an international conference in Fátima, Portugal, on propaganda during the pandemic. I’ll be discussing Big Disinformation censorship of vaccine science during the COVID-19 pandemic, to help people identify propaganda and begin thinking about tools to address this problem. I only give one or two academic talks a year, and it’s easier for me to write out what I’m going to say, then put the talk into slides. Here’s an oral presentation of my talk.

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We have learned a few things from the pandemic: social media companies are censoring “true content” on vaccines, labeling people “anti-vaxx” for expressing opinions that run afoul of government policies and pharmaceutical company financial interests. We also know that Big Pharma spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year on social media advertising for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, while these same companies regulate vaccine “misinformation” and confront pressure from governments and these same pharma companies.

Here’s my own journey into this.

Based on internal documents provided by an American whistleblower, I wrote a bombshell 2021 BMJ investigation that found data integrity problems in Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trial. Here’s a portion of that article:

A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial. Staff who conducted quality control checks were overwhelmed by the volume of problems they were finding. After repeatedly notifying Ventavia of these problems, the regional director, Brook Jackson, emailed a complaint to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Ventavia fired her later the same day. Jackson has provided The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails.

As I reported, the FDA never bothered to inspect Ventavia, once the whisteblower notified them. Here’s some of the evidence Brook Jackson provided to the BMJ. Venatavia sent an email to all employees expressing how afraid they were of an FDA inspection.

You can read more of those emails in a prior article I wrote.

After the BMJ published the investigation, Ventavia started lying, saying that Brook Jackson hadn’t worked on the Pfizer clinical trial. But we had documents showing she had. One is an email with Jackson thanking Pfizer’s Dr. Arturo Alfaro for giving her access to the COVID-19 clinical trial software. In a second email, Ventavia’s Mercedes Livingston invites Jackson and other staff to a “clean up call” on Pfizer’s clinical trial.

The investigation took off on social media, getting hundreds of thousands of views and an untold number of tweets and postings on social media sites. The article now has an Altmetric score of 44,967—the second highest score ever by the company that rates the influence of a science publication.

A week later, things took a turn. Referencing The BMJ article, Australia’s pharmaceutical regulator demanded that Pfizer explain itself. That same day, a Facebook fact checker named LeadStories censored my investigation as “missing context”—with a URL that used the term “hoax alert”—and “corrected” assertions that the investigation never made.

When people tried to post The BMJ investigation on Facebook, they were then greeted with a message: “Independent fact checkers say this information could mislead people.”

Editors with The BMJ sent Mark Zuckerberg an Open Letter calling his company’s fact check “inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.” UnHerd then posted an essay about the matter (BMJ fights back against Facebook fact-checkers: The medical journal was censored for 'misinformation' by the tech giant), while two BMJ editors wrote for The New Statesman that Facebook’s fact checkers found no errors in the investigation but were now playing moral police (In trying to tackle fake news, Facebook is cracking down on real science).

Reporter Matt Taibbi later interviewed LeadStories editor Alan Duke, who explained that the term “missing context” was invented by Facebook:

To deal with content that could mislead without additional context but which was otherwise true or real… Sometimes Facebook’s messaging about the fact checking labels can sound overly aggressive and scary. If you have an issue with their messaging you should indeed take it up with them as we are unable to change any of it.

As I told Taibbi at the time:

They’re not fact checking facts. What they’re doing is checking narratives. They can’t say that your facts are wrong, so it’s like, “Aha, there’s no context.” Or, “It’s misleading.” But that’s not a fact check. You just don’t like the story.

What I didn’t know is that Facebook began labeling “true content” on vaccines some months prior to my BMJ investigation, at the request of the Biden administration. This email later came to light in a lawsuit in which the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana are suing the Biden administration for violating the First Amendment.

The two White House officials cutting a deal with Facebook to label “true content” on vaccines that run counter to Biden administration policies are Democratic Party politicos Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt—neither has any training or background in public health.

Rob Flaherty is a former Biden campaign official who is now the White House’s director of digital media. Andy Slavitt is a Democratic political operative who has since left the White House and hosts a podcast. During the initial year of the pandemic, Slavitt advised New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on COVID-19, promoting his policies on nursing homes. ProPublica reported that Cuomo’s nursing home policies likely increased deaths, and New York’s attorney general later released a damning report that found the Cuomo administration had understated the number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50%.

According to Twitter Files— internal company documents made public by CEO Musk—Twitter also apparently operated to throttle “true content” on vaccines. One of the groups advising Twitter on COVID vaccine policy was the Virality Project, which operated from the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University.

When I went to Twitter’s headquarters, I searched through Twitter’s files to see if they had tried to throttle my investigation. I found that a Twitter employee reported the BMJ investigation after it began trending on Twitter: “This hashtag might feed potential misinformation.”

Twitter then reviewed the tweets and decided to not take any action. But they would continue to monitor it.

It should also be noted that while Twitter was attempting to monitor “vaccine misinformation” they were simultaneously helping to market COVID vaccines. In Twitter’s internal March 2021 COVID-19 program update, the company noted that they had begun working with their client Johnson & Johnson on a “messaging strategy” to promote the company’s COVID-19 vaccine.

We do not know how many other vaccine company clients Twitter has, nor how many pharma clients other social media companies like Facebook and Instagram have—companies which also remove and label “vaccine misinformation.” The Washington Post reported in March 2020 that an advertising company found that spending by pharmaceutical and health-care brands, just on Facebook mobile ads, reached nearly a billion dollars in 2019, nearly tripling over two years.

A financial news outlet The Edge in Malaysia reported that the top five pharma advertisers in the United States spent $152 million on social media advertising in 2020 on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Pfizer was the top spender at $55 million.

Nobody that I’m aware of has given thought to how social media companies can regulate pharma “misinformation” while Big Pharma is also one of their biggest advertising clients.