The Twitter Files Part XV Unrolled

How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy.

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You can find all the Twitter Files unrolled here.

Lee Fang @lhfang

1. New piece from the TWITTER FILES. How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy. The push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries.

Lee Fang @lhfang

2. In 2020, it was clear that the pandemic would require rapid innovation. Early on, there was a push to make the solution equitable: an international partnership to share ideas, technology, new forms of medicine to rapidly solve this crisis.

medicinespatentpool.orgNew agreement under C-TAP aims to improve global access to COVID-19 testing technologies - MPPGeneva – A new, open, transparent sublicence agreement between the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) on behalf of C-TAP, and South African pharmaceutical company Biotech Africa will accelerate the manufacture and sale of a COVID-19 serological antibody technology around the world. The World Health Organiz…

Lee Fang @lhfang

3. But global drug giants saw the crisis as an opportunity for unprecedented profit. Behind closed doors, pharma launched a massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new covid-related medicine, including therapeutics and vaccines.

Lee Fang @lhfang

4. BIO, the lobby group that represents biopharma, including Moderna & Pfizer, wrote to the newly elected Biden admin, demanding the U.S. gov sanction any country attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost covid medicine or vaccines.

theintercept.comDrug Lobby Asks Biden to Punish Foreign Countries Pushing for Low-Cost VaccinesBig Pharma is fighting for tight control over Covid-19 vaccine production, limiting availability worldwide while reaping billions.

Lee Fang @lhfang

5. That brings us to Twitter. The global lobbying blitz includes direct pressure on social media. BioNTech, which developed Pfizer's vaccine, reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines.

Lee Fang @lhfang

6. Twitter's reps responded quickly to the pharma request, which was also backed by the German government. A lobbyist in Europe asked the content moderation team to monitor the accounts of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & of activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine

Lee Fang @lhfang

7. The potential "fake accounts" that Twitter monitored for protesting Pfizer? These were real people. Here's one the Twitter team flagged for potential terms of use violations. I talked to Terry, a 74 year old retired bricklayer in the UK on the phone. https://t.co/qIH0Tngsm1

Terry Brough #PeaceJusticeSocialism ✊ @TerryB28937065

Dear @AlbertBourla, @sbancel & #PascalSoriot, 9/10 people in poor countries are going to MISS OUT on a #COVID19 vaccine next year. Will @Pfizer, @BioNTech_Group @moderna_tx & @AstraZeneca #JoinCTAP to ensure that everyone, everywhere can be safe? We need a #PeoplesVaccine!

Lee Fang @lhfang

8. It's not clear what actions Twitter ultimately took on this particular request. Several Twitter employees noted in subsequent messages that none of this activism constituted abuse. But the company continued monitoring tweets.

Lee Fang @lhfang

9. In a separate push, Pfizer & Moderna's lobbying group, BIO, fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects, which worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid "misinformation."

Lee Fang @lhfang

10. BIO provided $1,275,000 to the campaign, part of which is revealed through tax forms. The PGP campaign, called "Stronger," helped Twitter create content moderation bots, select which public health accounts got verification, helped crowdsource content takedowns.

Lee Fang @lhfang

11. Many of the tweets the BIO-funded campaign focused on were truly unhinged misinfo, like claims that vaccines include microchips. But others Stronger lobbied Twitter on were more of a grey area, like vaccine passports & vaccine mandates, policies that coerce vaccination.

Lee Fang @lhfang

12. The Moderna/Pfizer-funded campaign included direct regular emails with lists of tweets to takedown & others to verify. Here's an example of those types of emails that went straight to Twitter's lobbyists and content moderators. Many focused on @zerohedge, which was suspended.

Lee Fang @lhfang

13. Notably, this massive push to censor and label covid misinfo never applied to drug companies. When big pharma wildly exaggerated the risks of creating low-cost generic covid vaccines, Stronger did nothing. The rules applied only to critics of industry.

PhRMA @PhRMA

The biopharma sector employs more than 900,000 workers and supports 4.4 million U.S. jobs. Those jobs would be at risk if the #TRIPS waiver is extended to #COVID19 treatments. Read more about the real consequences of waiving commitments to protect IP: https://t.co/0ppR9AUQGl

Lee Fang @lhfang

14. Here is my reported piece w/more detail. I was given some access to Twitter emails. I signed/agreed to nothing, Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by a Twitter attorney, so what I saw could be limited.

theintercept.comCovid-19 Drugmakers Pressured Twitter to Censor Activists Pushing for Generic VaccineThe social media pressure campaign was just a part of the pharmaceutical industry’s successful lobbying blitz to retain patents — and make record profits.