Twitter Files: Drugmakers pushed for censorship of generic vaccine advocacy
Christopher Hutton
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Representatives from drug companies pushed for the censorship of COVID-19 vaccine-related threads on Twitter, even those from accounts with minimal readership, to forestall competition, newly released internal documents show.
Lobbyists from medical companies such as BioNTech and Pfizer were in regular contact with Twitter, pushing for it to restrict specific online campaigns around the vaccine, according to the latest Twitter Files released by the Intercept’s Lee Fang. They tried to quell an international effort to require Pfizer and other vaccine manufacturers to share intellectual property so other companies can reproduce the coronavirus vaccine.
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The censorship campaigns were regularly sent via the company’s policy team. For example, former Twitter’s head of public policy in Germany, Nina Morschhaeuser, forwarded an email from a BioNTech spokesperson who asked Twitter to “hide” activist tweets targeting her company’s account over two days. The email also asked them to monitor the hashtags #peoplesvaccine and #joinCTAP, both of which were used to promote a World Health Organization program that helped spread vaccine access to developing countries.
When asked how to monitor these alleged campaigns related to the requests offered by a pharmaceutical company, a Twitter spokesperson pulled together a collection of tweets that could be alleged violations, many of which were from nonprominent users. Two of the listed tweets were from a British bricklayer named Terry Brough, who had asked Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca to share their technology with poorer countries.
Brough was surprised to be told that his account had been targeted. “I’m actually 74 and still living,” Brough told Fang. “I was a bricklayer all my life just like my dad. I’m no Che Guevara, but I’ve been an activist, a trade unionist, and a socialist. And all I did was sign a tweet. I wish I could’ve done more, really.”
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The email request arrived at the same time that pharmaceutical companies launched a campaign to prevent having to share the vaccine patents in 2020.
Previous versions of the Twitter Files have detailed the company’s communications with federal officials regarding content moderation. This included efforts by select members of Congress to take down content and regular communications between Twitter and the FBI to remove alleged Russian bots and misinformation from the platform.