The Intersection of Journalism and Government-Media Collusion

Journalist's Experience with the Twitter Files and Government-Media Collusion

The journalist's role in accessing the Twitter files was to expose to the public what happened regarding COVID-19 related stories on Twitter.
The journalist observed an overly heavy hand on suppressing important information on Twitter, particularly in one direction.
The journalist was involved in the Twitter files under the request of Barry Weiss, who had access to the files.
The journalist and a few other journalists were able to access the back end of Twitter to search for specific accounts and tweets to see if there were any special flags or marks on them.
The journalists had no access to any personal information on people's accounts.
The journalists were able to view the log files within Twitter that showed if a specific tweet or account had certain flags on them.
The journalists were also able to have Twitter perform searches for them in the internal slack channels and emails on specific employees at Twitter.
The journalists had a very limited window of time to sift through an extraordinary amount of information.
The journalist was the first journalist in America to write for a major publication to question the idea that schools should remain closed during the pandemic.
The journalist was turned down by many major publications, except for Wired, for their article on the topic.
The journalist's background as a fact-checker and their observations led them to pursue the topic of COVID-19 and schools.
The journalist believes that government-media collusion efforts to craft narratives during emergencies are not justified and that critics need to abound in such situations.Investigative Journalist David Zweig on COVID-19, School Closures, and Twitter Suppression
David Zweig became interested in investigating COVID-19 related issues due to the lack of adequate answers to important questions.
He wrote a stream of articles for various publications challenging the mainstream narrative on COVID-19 related topics such as school closures and myocarditis.
Zweig established a Rolodex of infectious disease specialists and other experts through his reporting and research.
He reached out to Barry Meier, a journalist he knew, to share his information on Twitter suppression of COVID-19 related content.
Meier and her editors asked Zweig to investigate and write about Twitter suppression himself.
Zweig was particularly interested in investigating the suppression of content from experts such as Martin Koldorf and Andrew Bostom.
He was motivated by a desire to understand the information environment and to determine what was true based on empirical data.
Zweig believes that the myopic focus on suppressing the transmission of COVID-19 led to a lack of acknowledgement of the harms and damages caused by mitigation efforts.
He sees a parallel between the risks of the disease and the risks of immune overreaction, which can cause autoimmune diseases and excess inflammation.
The extended immune system, which includes behaviors such as disgust and repulsion, is a manifestation of the biological defenses against infection.
Pathogen transmission is extremely deadly, as demonstrated by the high death toll among Native Americans after contact with Europeans who brought mumps, measles, and smallpox.
Zweig's investigation of COVID-19 related issues has led him to write a book on school closures during the pandemic.The Dangers of a Pathological Response to the Pandemic
The behavioral immune system has extended into authoritarian pandemic responses, spearheaded by China.
The hyper-focus on the potential danger of the pathogen led to the elimination of consideration for potential side effects of amelioration strategies, such as risks to education, working class, and fundamental liberties.
Politicians abdicated their responsibility to experts, and public health experts had no idea how to contemplate all the other risks.
The response was more pathological than the pathogen, and the pharmaceutical companies were effective at lobbying for their financial interests in making vaccines.
Pharmaceutical companies have had the most significant lawsuits for malfeasance levied against them in the history of capitalism.
There was no mechanism in place for a review of what was happening, and there was never any sort of sunset clause on any of these things.
The church case in California is an example of the totalitarian tendency to undermine natural rights in the service of social cohesion and safety.
The default in America is for children to be in school, and keeping them barred from school became the intervention.
The extraordinary times require extraordinary evidence, and the violation of natural rights should be justified by a body of proof.
The death rate among children from COVID-19 was vanishingly small, and teachers were at no higher risk than other professionals.
Evidence from studies out of Sweden was dismissed and ignored.
The risk posed by an enterprise should be no greater than the risk people will voluntarily undertake, such as driving.Discussion on Risk, Society, and Censorship
The balance between personal freedom and risk to others is a societal obligation, but society traditionally has a high tolerance for risk, such as higher speed limits on highways.
Human beings are potential carriers of pathogens, but they are also valuable sources of cooperative enterprise and information, leading to a battle between pathogen restriction and information freedom.
The political landscape is a battle between walls and doors, with liberals advocating for doors and conservatives advocating for walls, but both are necessary.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an overreaction where society decided to build walls instead of allowing for doors, which was a paradoxical flip from the previous liberal stance on freedom of information.
There was an astonishing lack of curiosity and a lack of challenging of expert opinions during the pandemic, with journalists and the elite sphere of influencer class not questioning the evidence presented.
Evidence-based medicine emphasizes the importance of actual observational evidence over expert opinion, but most reporting during the pandemic relied heavily on expert opinions without challenging them.
Twitter's suppression and censorship was orchestrated through a system of bots, independent contractors, and people themselves, with the bots flagging certain tweets or accounts based on certain triggers, while independent contractors were given a decision tree to adjudicate tweets' validity, and people made choices on what content was acceptable on the platform.
The dark tetrad, a set of traits including manipulativeness, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism, make up about 3% of the population and can cause trouble in any social enterprise, including social media platforms.
Social media platforms need to control content, but the line of control is difficult to establish, and regulation of social environments is a universal human problem.
The author's job as a journalist going to Twitter was to expose to the public what happened, and there can be a broader conversation about where lines should or shouldn't be drawn.
There was an overly heavy hand on suppressing important information during Twitter's censorship, with the heavy hand always seeming to go in one direction, and tweets from prominent scientists and regular citizens were labeled as misleading.
There were people at Twitter who were trying their best to do what they felt was right, but sometimes they went overboard.