During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Twitter's leaders bowed to government pressure to censor information that was true but inconvenient, suspended medical professionals who disagreed with establishment views, and relied on bots and foreign contractors to moderate complex scientific topics, according to the newest edition of the Twitter Files.

Independent journalist David Zweig released the 40-tweet Twitter Files report — “How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate” — on Monday. The report is based on internal Twitter files that Zweig reviewed for the Free Press. The Twitter Files is a series of reports based on internal Twitter documents released to select journalists by the company's new CEO, Elon Musk.

Zweig reported Monday that both the Biden and Trump administrations pressured Twitter and other social-media platforms to elevate content that fit their narratives and to suppress information that didn't. At the outset of the pandemic, the Trump administration urged tech companies to "combat misinformation" about "runs on grocery stores," Zweig reported.

"But," Zweig noted, "there were runs on grocery stores." It wasn't misinformation but was instead a true phenomenon the Trump administration did not want to be highlighted.

When Joe Biden took over as president, his administration was concerned about "anti-vaxxer accounts," and particularly the account of journalist Alex Berenson, Zweig reported.

8. When the Biden admin took over, one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on Covid. The focus was on "anti-vaxxer accounts." Especially Alex Berenson: pic.twitter.com/yBNeF2YbD3

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

Berenson's Twitter account was suspended hours after Biden alleged that social-media companies were "killing people" for allowing vaccine misinformation. Berenson later sued and eventually settled with Twitter.

Zweig reported that Biden's team was "very angry" that Twitter hadn't been more aggressive at de-platforming accounts that it didn't approve of.

"An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed employees often debating moderation cases in great deal, and with more care than was shown by the government toward free speech," Zweig reported.

But, Zweig reported, Twitter did suppress views, including the views of doctors and scientific experts whose opinions "conflicted with the official position of the White House," "differed from CDC guidelines," or were "contrarian but true.”

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard Medical School epidemiologist, tweeted views at odds with U.S. public-health authorities and the American Left ("the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter"), Zweig's report noted. One of his tweets about vaccines was flagged by a moderator as "false information," even though it was essentially an expert opinion, and in line with vaccine policies in several other countries. "Yet it was deemed 'false information' by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines," Zweig reported.

23. After Twitter took action, Kulldorff's tweet was slapped with a "Misleading" label and all replies and likes were shut off, throttling the tweet's ability to be seen and shared by many people, the ostensible core function of the platform: pic.twitter.com/Qa1HpaEray

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island physician, was permanently suspended from Twitter for spreading supposed misinformation, including a tweet that referred to the results from a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines. An internal audit conducted after Bostom's lawyer contacted Twitter found that only one of his five alleged violations was valid; and it was deemed a violation only because it "cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment's narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children," Zweig wrote.

Zweig reported that much of Twitter's content moderation was conducted by bots trained in machine-learning and artificial intelligence, as well as by foreign contractors in places like the Philippines. Higher-level Twitter leaders chose the inputs and decision trees the bots and foreign contractors based the decisions on, Zweig wrote, adding that "tasking non experts to adjudicate tweets on complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacy data was destined for a significant error rate."

Human bias "run amok," Zweig wrote, noting the reaction to an October 2020 tweet by then-president Donald Trump after he had contracted Covid and was released from Walter Reed Medical Center. "Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life," Trump had tweeted.

33. Another example of human bias run amok was the reaction to this tweet by Trump. Many Trump tweets led to extensive internal debates, and this one was no different. pic.twitter.com/kQs1ADPVAk

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

Jim Baker, then Twitter's deputy general counsel (who has since been fired), questioned why that statement was not flagged as a violation of Twitter's policies. Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, had to explain that optimism didn't count as misinformation.

34. In a surreal exchange, Jim Baker, at the time Twitter's Deputy General Counsel, asks why telling people to not be afraid wasn't a violation of Twitter's Covid-19 misinformation policy. pic.twitter.com/SxvOKcvaT7

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022