Files: Democrat pressured Twitter to censor

Pfizer official lobbied on COVID-19 tweets

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-calif., and his staff members relentlessly asked Twitter to censor posts on the social media platform, according to internal Twitter documents published Thursday by journalist Matt Taibbi.

The files, distributed by Twitter CEO Elon Musk, showed that Schiff and other Democrats refused to accept Twitter’s warning that there was no evidence of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election.

On Friday, Taibbi tweeted that Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and his staff “wrote to Twitter quite often, asking that tweets be taken down.”

One request concerned a parody photo of then-democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden.

“The real issue was Donald Trump retweeted the Biden pic,” Taibbi tweeted. “To its credit Twitter refused to remove it, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth saying it had obvious ‘humorous intent’ and ‘any reasonable observer’ — apparently, not a Schiff staffer — could see it was doctored.”

Schiff staffer Jeff Lowenstein, however, responded by contending there was a “slippery slope concern here.”

Twitter also refused requests for banning content about Schiff and his team.

The latest installment, dubbed Twitter Files 14, also said Schiff ’s office “repeatedly complained about ‘Qanon-related activity’ that were often tweets about other matters, like the identity of the Ukraine ‘whistleblower’ or the Steele dossier:”

The Schiff team actually did have a concern about its own behavior. Members worried that “deamplification” of tweets might “make it harder for law enforcement to track the offending Tweeters.”

An earlier release of documents dubbed Twitter Files 13 showed Schiff wasn’t the only one lobbying Twitter.

Former Food and Drug Administration chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer director, lobbied for the censorship of tweets that might have harmed the bottom line of the company he was representing.

“Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on COVID public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on MRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021,” according to Alex Berenson, an author on the pandemic and a former New York Times reporter.

“Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year.”

Internal Twitter communications reviewed by Berenson showed Gottlieb used his authority as a former government official to lobby through the Twitter government censorship channels to censor a Dr. Brett Giroir tweet saying natural immunity was effective in place of a Pfizer vaccine.

The 12th edition of the Twitter Files just after the start of the new year continued to detail how the FBI became the “conduits” to amass censorship requests.

In that edition, Taibbi detailed how a media pressure campaign caused frustration at Twitter, inundated it with government censorship orders, and forced it to request the FBI to feed requests through a single cord attached at the company “belly button.”

Eventually, the FBI umbilical cord was fully effective in receiving bans, according to Taibbi.

However, Twitter was inundated, and confused, leaving the FBI frustrated it would not get immediate results on censorship requests.

“It all led to the situation … in which Twitter was paid $3,415,323, essentially for being an overwhelmed subcontractor,” Taibbi concluded. “Twitter wasn’t just paid. For the amount of work they did for government, they were underpaid.”

Adam Schiff