Tag: twitter

Twitter blocked links to Daily Mail article that questioned Covid death stats

Twitter has put a warning on an article from the UK’s Daily Mail, one of the biggest news outlets in the country, that describes the article as potentially being “unsafe.”

The article is written by the newspaper’s deputy health editor, Eve Simmons, and discusses how official government figures vastly overstated the COVID-19 death rate due to bad reporting.

“Warning: this link may be unsafe,” Twitter displays when users  go to click the link to the article.

“The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe, in accordance with Twitter’s URL Policy,” it says at the time of writing.

It’s unclear who these “partners” are that have called for the censorship of the article.

“Health chiefs admitted, embarrassingly, that the numbers they’d been feeding the Government were only an approximation – provoking fury from Ministers,” the article reads.

“More recently it was revealed that a quarter of Omicron deaths included in the daily figures did not, in fact, list Covid as a primary cause.

“More than two years since Covid-19 emerged, many feel they want a simple answer: how many were killed by this virus?

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Twitter Announces New Policies Promising Censorship of ‘Misleading’ Posts Relating to Russia and Ukraine

Twitter has announced policies promising the censorship of “misleading” posts relating to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

As all conservatives already know, “misleading” tends to mean anything that the establishment disagrees with when it comes to Big Tech policies.

“We’re actively monitoring for risks associated with the conflict in Ukraine, including identifying and disrupting attempts to amplify false and misleading information,” Twitter announced in a lengthy tweet thread about steps they are taking. “We’re proactively reviewing Tweets to detect platform manipulation (or other inauthentic behavior) and taking enforcement action against synthetic and manipulated media that presents a false or misleading depiction of what’s happening.”

Once again, the big tech giant admitted that they are a publisher with an editorial slant instead of a platform.

“We’re continuing to provide as much context around content relating to the crisis as possible, including through Moments and Events on Twitter,” Twitter Safety tweeted.

Twitter also said they are monitoring high-profile accounts to “mitigate any attempts at a targeted takeover or manipulation.”

“We’re actively monitoring vulnerable high-profile accounts, including journalists, activists, and government officials and agencies to mitigate any attempts at a targeted takeover or manipulation,” the thread continued.

The company continued to announce that for “people using Twitter in Ukraine and Russia, we also paused some Tweet recommendations from people you don’t follow on Home Timeline to reduce the spread of abusive content.”

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Twitter creates January 6th “harmful” content enforcement team

Twitter has announced the formation of a team of content reviewers to scan the platform for “harmful” content relating to the January 6, 2021 riot.

The platform said that it “convened a cross-functional working group” from members of its Site Integrity division and the Trust and Safety team.

This new team will scan the platform for harmful content about the anniversary of last year’s riot at the US Capitol.

The new team is part of Twitter’s commitment to “strong enforcement action against accounts and tweets that incite violence.”

“Our approach both before and after January 6 has been to take strong enforcement action against accounts and tweets that incite violence or have the potential to lead to offline harm,” a representative for Twitter explained in a statement to Reuters.

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Twitter sued, accused of acting ‘on behalf’ of US govt

Former New York Times reporter and outspoken critic of the US response to the Covid pandemic Alex Berenson is suing Twitter for suspending his account, claiming the platform “acted on behalf of the federal government.

In the lawsuit, filed this week in the Northern District of California, Berenson accused Twitter of breach of contract and of violating his First Amendment rights.

The alleged breach of contract stems from the fact that Berenson claims a Twitter executive had repeatedly assured him that he would be free to express his views on the platform without fear of retaliation. 

“Despite the controversy around his statements, a senior Twitter executive repeatedly assured Mr. Berenson that the company backed his right to free expression and that he would continue to enjoy access to the platform,” Berenson’s lawyers said in the suit. 

The independent reporter and best-selling author was reportedly suspended from Twitter in August over a tweet questioning whether Covid vaccines could actually prevent infection and transmission of the virus, referring to them as “therapeutic” drugs. A Twitter spokesperson at the time said Berenson was permanently suspended for “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.”

In the tweet, Berenson wrote: “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS.”

Berenson argues the platform acted on behalf of the Biden administration in censoring his posts, as the president himself had criticized “misinformation” about Covid spreading on social media only days before the author’s suspension. 

He is also claiming in his lawsuit that a California law applying to “common carriers” applies to Twitter. The legislation, dating back to 1872, regulates companies that “offer to the public to carry persons, property, or messages.”

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Maxwell Case: Surveilled And Silenced

The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, former partner of Jeffrey Epstein, looks like it is being set up to fail. Prosecutors rested their case after nine days in which victims seemed barely prepared for cross-examination and co-conspirators were notable by their absence.

Even this threadbare reckoning was too much information for Twitter, which banned a popular account reporting daily from Manhattan Federal Court. The new Twitter CEO has previously said the company is not bound by the First Amendment, and blocked posts that were drawing 500,000 views.

The touchy revelation seems to have been that hard drives removed from Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse in 2019 already had FBI tags on them, suggesting they’d previously been seized and returned to the predator.

The state-corporatist media, like the federal prosecutors, have ignored the clear implication of surveillance and even blackmail. The court case is limited to six counts relating to sex trafficking and Maxwell’s alleged involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen women.

Not only does it seem U.S. agencies may have been complicit in compromising individuals — Twitter tries to stop us from knowing. Kudos to The Free Press Report for its daily summary of the trial.

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Twitter will now ban users that repeatedly claim vaccinated people can spread Covid

Twitter has quietly updated its “COVID-19 misleading information policy” to impose new sanctions on tweets about vaccines, PCR tests, and health authorities. These sanctions include removing and labeling tweets. Both types of sanctions also result in Twitter users accruing strikes on their account which can lead to a permanent suspension.

While the top of Twitter’s COVID-19 misleading information policy page currently states “Overview November 2021,” a December 2 archive of the page shows that the page was updated and the “Overview November 2021” text was added after December 2.

One of the most notable changes to this “COVID-19 misleading information policy” we noticed is related to claims about whether vaccinated people can spread the coronavirus. The policy now states that Twitter will label tweets with “corrective information” and give users a strike if they:

  • Claim that “the vaccines will cause you to be sick, spread the virus, or would be more harmful than getting COVID-19”
  • Post what Twitter describes as “false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus (or symptoms, or immunity) to unvaccinated people”

This means Twitter users could now be sanctioned for sharing or discussing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) admission that “vaccinated people can still become infected and have the potential to spread the virus to others.”

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Secret Twitter program fast-tracks elite users’ takedown demands

Facebook was recently raked over the coals by a former employee for having policies that give preferential treatment and protect high profile users only, but now it seems this is not such a rare occurrence among social media giants.

Take Twitter, for example, which just got exposed for running a secret program designed to give priority to its most prominent users, and protect them from what is perceived as attacks by “trolls and bullies.”

Twitter is carrying out its decision, Bloomberg reported, to protect the political elites and celebrities via a program called Project Guardian, that pushes reports about abusive content posted against these users to the front of the moderation queue.

Apart from shielding who Twitter picks as the most important people on the platform (reports about the secretive program say that many who are protected by it are unaware of this), the company is also able to control what content gets viral and has wide reach, and quickly stem the spread of tweets it disapproves of.

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Twitter Bans Account That Posted Updates About Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein Trial

In a post written to the PatriotOne substack, The Free Press Report wrote “I woke up this morning and the @TrackerTrial account on Twitter was suspended. All the other accounts that I have made in the past were also suspended.”

According to a screen shot provided in the Substack article, the @TrackerTrial account was suspended for allegedly breaking Twitter’s “rules against platform manipulation and spam.”

“The @TrackerTrial account was the largest account on Twitter that specifically tracked the Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein trial.”

The Free Press Report noted that all other accounts previously created by the same user were banned, including another popular account that tracked Nancy Pelosi’s stock market purchases and sales.

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Twitter labels American Heart Association link as ‘unsafe’ over Covid vaccines

Twitter is flagging an American Heart Association website link as ‘unsafe’ after the organization published an abstract of research linking Covid-19 vaccines to heart disease.

The abstract of the study looking into a possible correlation between mRNA Covid shots and heart inflammation was published in one of the Association’s journals, Circulation, on November 16. The research points to a 14-point rise in the risk of acute coronary syndrome within five years in those who have been injected with this type of vaccine, concluding that the “mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.”

It is worth noting, however, that while the American Heart Association did publish the abstract, it later attached an “expression of concern” to the study over “potential errors” in it. Among other things, it cites the author’s reliance on anecdotal data and a lack of statistical analyses. The Association warned the “abstract in its current version may not be reliable.” On top of that, the study has yet to be peer-reviewed.

Twitter’s ‘unsafe’ label was up until recently reserved for webpages thought to contain viruses and malware; its use has, however, now been extended to also cover cases where ‘misleading content’ is suspected.

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