Paul D. Thacker Profile picture
Journalist; Former Investigator U.S. Senate; Former Safra Ethics Center, Harvard. https://t.co/aD6NkYzjqM

May 21, 2023, 19 tweets

1. I'm giving a talk today at a conference on propaganda in Fátima, Portugal. So great to see everyone.

Schedule here: saudemental-propaganda.com/en/ I'm going to be discussing some new #TwitterFiles and releasing them and my talk here first @PanData19

2. Big Disinformation has policies to ban ”true content” on COVID-19 vaccines. Simultaneously, social media police "vaccine misinformation" while Big Pharma pays them hundreds of millions of dollars for advertising.

3. In late 2021, I published a blockbuster BMJ investigation on corruption in Pfizer's COVID-19 clinical trial. @IamBrookJackson provided The BMJ dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails.

4. @IamBrookJackson repeatedly notified her company of failings and then reported this to the FDA, which never investigated.

Here's a company email some days before Jackson noticed FDA--her company was in a panic. "THE FDA IS COMING SOON"

5. Jackson's company started lying to reporters, saying she was never on the Pfizer Clinical trial. But we had internal emails proving she was.

This email is for a "clean up call" to fix data on Pfizer's trial. Just one example. We also had secret recordings.

6. This investigation was the most highly cited science publication of 2021, and the second highest ever by Altmetric.

I was also a finalist for a journalism prize.

7. Some weeks after it appeared, Australia's government started demanding answers from Pfizer. That same day, a Facebook "fact checker" called LeadStories started censoring the article.

8. BMJ sent Mark Zuckerberg an open letter calling his company’s fact check “inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.”

Articles in other outlets began calling out Facebook and LeadStories for censorship and incompetence.

9. I later told @mtaibbi: "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."

10. Some months back, documents became public from a lawsuit by Attorney's General suing the Biden Administration for censoring Americans by proxy--colluding w/ social media companies to throttle speech.

Here' the Free Speech Clause of the 1st Amendment

11. This documents shows that months before BMJ published my investigation, Facebook cut a deal with the Biden White House to limit "true content" on vaccines.

This is exactly what Facebook's "fact checker" LeadStories did.

12. #TwitterFiles show that the Stanford Virality Project was doing the same thing, while advising Twitter, taking action on "true posts which could fuel hesitancy."

Basically, truth the conflicted w/ Biden administration policy.

13. NEW #TWITTERFILE Sure enough, Twitter flagged my BMJ investigation, when #Pfizergate started trending.

14. Twitter reviewed the tweets and decided to not take any action. But they would continue to monitor it.
"Should the rhetoric change, please let us know and we will review again."

Again, these tweets were true.

15. This #TwitterFile shows that Twitter began working with their client J&J on "messaging strategy" to sell their COVID-19 vaccine.

QUESTION: How Twitter be trusted to call out "vaccine misinformation" when J&J is paying them to market their vaccine?

16. QUESTION: How many vaccine clients does Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and other social media companies have, and how much are these companies paying them?

17. Washington Post reported in March 2020 that pharmaceutical and health-care brands spent nearly $1 billion just on Facebook mobile ads.

Top 5 pharma advertisers spent $152 million in US on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in 2020. Pfizer was the top spender at $55 million.

18. Do not "follow the science."

FOLLOW THE DOCUMENTS.

FOLLOW THE MONEY.

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