1. Twitter Provided Privileged Access to Banning Queen, Taylor Lorenz #TwitterFiles
Twitter engineer walking me through their reporting system, "Wow! She's a heavy user."
2. Shortly after @elonmusk bought Twitter, @TaylorLorenz got apoplectic, writing that Twitter was "opening the gates of hell" by letting banned accounts back.
(Take a wild guess what Taylor did the month prior....)
3. The month prior, Taylor Lorenz got this tiny account banned. Surprise!
The account detailed Lorenz as a Manhattan rich girl, who attended Swiss boarding school, and whose uncle owns Internet Archive, thus erasing her past.
Nope. No ban evasion, abuse, harassment toward Taylor Lorenz, platform manipulation, or the sharing of personal information.
“The account was generally healthy and mostly conversational or commentary in nature.”
5. Nonetheless, Twitter suspended the account because it "violates the Twitter Media Policy."
The account then deactivated.
6. A month prior to that, Lorenz went after @DrJBhattacharya for tweeting an email by her friend and itinerant blogger @WalkerBragman. Bhattacharya tweeted a harassing email Bragman sent him and it had Bragman's contact info.
7. Bragman played this all up on Twitter of course to call attention to himself, retweeting Bhattcharya's tweet, before people made fun of him for "doxing himself."
Manhattan rich kids playing at journalist are easily bruised, it seems.
8. Bragman's game is to constantly accuse people of being "Koch funded."
FYI: Soros funded me to give the plenary talk at a 2019 BMJ conference on investigative journalism, but that does not make me a "Soros funded" journalist.
9. Several of Lorenz's past reporting targets tell me she seems to work in concert with her sources. After Lorenz doxed @libsoftiktok in the Post, Alejandra Caraballo sent Twitter a "private letter" to remove Libs of TikTok.
Lorenz quoted Caraballo in the Post that next month.
10. The letter was sent by Caraballo and several groups including the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a favored source in Lorenz essays on banning.
11. I asked Caraballo what came of the meeting w/ Twitter and to see the letter they sent. But got no response. I also don't know if Libs of TikTok was successful in getting Caraballo suspended for harassment.
12. It's hard to understand Lorenz's concerns about doxxing when she has done this so many times herself. Here's one allegation in a defamation lawsuit by @littlemissjacob against Lorenz that is still working it's way through the courts.
13. Lorenz had more than special reporting access to get accounts banned. When Tucker Carlson did a piece ridiculing her, Twitter put out an alert-"We need to be careful with her."
I couldn't evidence that Twitter provided this support to other reporters. I never got it.
14. Taylor also provided special support to a source in stories she wrote for the Atlantic, NY Times, and recently for the Post. When Jackson Weimer's account was suspended, Lorenz put this in front of Twitter.
15. Lorenz has incredibly unorthodox (is that the right word?) reporting tactics. Here's an affidavit signed by someone she quoted in the article about @littlemissjacob
FYI: this person was a minor.
16. Here's an affidavit signed by a Lorenz source for a NY Times story about Arya Toufanian
17. Toufanian told me he sued Lorenz over the article, and she then began sending messages to gin up a DOJ investigation against him.
This email Lorenz is sending around is for an Assistant US Attorney in NY.
18. Toufanian later received a subpoena from the Southern District that reads like a rip and read of Lorenz's article.
The investigation dragged on for 3 years. He recently received this email to pick up his laptop that was confiscated. "I was never charged."
19. Neither Lorenz nor Cameron Barr with the Post responded to questions.
1. According to emails I'm releasing, Congress will correct the record on CDC Director Walensky's false statement about masks.
(Plus, I've uncovered conflicts of interest at Cochrane)
2. During a hearing before Congress, CDC Director Walensky made the false claim that a Cochrane review on masks had been "retracted." Social media influencer Zeynep Tufekci made an earlier false claim the review had been "corrected."
Fact check false!
3. Cochrane authors cannot force the NY Times to correct Tufekci's misleading claims and false statements, but Congress is correcting the CDC Director's false statement.
Here's the congressional staffer email thanking Cochrane for bringing this to the attention of Congress.
1. Why did Twitter censor Tucker Carlson? Better yet, who helped Twitter do that? #TuckerTwitterFiles
2. While reading an endless sea of #TwitterFiles, one request to censor alleged "Covid misinformation" stood out: Tucker Carlson.
Tucker is now in the news after Fox announced his departure.
3. A Twitter employee emailed colleagues in June 2021 to inquire if a Tucker Carlson op-ed for @FoxNewsOpinion should be flagged for COVID-19 "misinformation."
Last December, @elonmusk sent out his viral tweet about Fauci.
Fauci went on Fox News and said he had "no clue what [Elon] was talking about."
2) "A lot of people are spouting out a lot of things about me and Twitter," Fauci told @FoxNews. "I've never had a Twitter account. I don't intend on having a Twitter account, and I've had nothing to do with Twitter. So I don't know what they're talking about when they say that."
3) Fauci made similar claims, during multiple exchanges, in a 7-hour deposition, where he denied using Twitter or even knowing how to access a tweet.
1. Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci have destroyed trust.
When Collins was being confirmed to run NIH, he had to come through my Senate office. wsj.com/articles/resea…
2. When we met, I had already gotten 1 Institute Director fired and several academics forced from their jobs, and I had warned Elias Zerhouni that if he didn't clean up problems at the NIH, I was pivoting to focus on him.
"You tell me where to point the cannons."
3. Collins listened to me and nodded at all the right moments.
But Collins never knew I already had people in Building 1 telling me he didn't really care. He just wanted more money and for me to leave him the hell alone.
1. “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Anthony Fauci said, blasting his critics during a 2021 interview about his advice on the pandemic.
So the NY Times confronted Fauci w/ an unimpeachable source: Anthony Fauci.
Fauci has long stated he has an "open mind" about the pandemic's beginning, but the New York Times pointed out that Fauci dismissed a Wuhan lab accident as a "conspiracy theory" on a podcast in early 2020. nytimes.com/2023/03/28/opi…
3. If this sounds familiar to readers of @DisInfoChron, that’s because I uncovered this podcast and reported on it back in December.
Nonetheless, it’s great to see the New York Times catching up.