https://www.city-journal.org/did-the-government-pressure-twitter-to-curtail-speech
Last month, Covid vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson was allowed back on Twitter after being “permanently” suspended for allegedly violating the platform’s Covid-19 “misinformation” policy. Remarkably, Twitter acknowledged that his tweets “should have not led” to his suspension.
Now, new internal Twitter documents publicized by Berenson reveal that the Biden administration likely played a pivotal role in his suspension. As a Twitter employee reported on the company’s internal Slack messaging system, the company faced “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform” in an April 2021 White House meeting. Another employee reported that Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to President Biden’s Covid response team, claimed that he had seen evidence indicating that Berenson was “the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.”
In the summer of 2021, the federal government repeatedly pressured social media platforms to ramp up efforts to crack down on Covid “misinformation.” On July 16, 2021, Biden claimed that social-media companies were “killing people” by failing to censor Covid misinformation. A few hours after Biden’s comment, Twitter suspended Berenson’s account for the first time. The next month, Twitter banned him after he tweeted about the vaccine’s inability to stop transmission and infection over the long-term and its side-effect profile.
Berenson, who now plans to sue the White House after his recent legal success against Twitter, is the most prominent victim of social-media companies’ heavy-handed policies, but many distinguished scientists with far less public and financial support have faced similar fates.