Smoking-gun messages from inside Twitter show that the White House pushed the leftist social-media giant to shut down Alex Berenson, the former New York Times science scribe who played a key role in discrediting the Deep State’s China Virus and vaccine narratives.
Twitter did ban the contrarian, who sued and won when Twitter reinstated his popular account. But that lawsuit did more than bring Twitter to its senses.
It uncovered the messages that show Biden and/or his top advisors targeted Berenson for censorship.
The obvious question is whether Berenson can pursue legal action against the Biden administration, which importuned Twitter to do something that the administration cannot do, thanks to a little something called the First Amendment: Stop someone from saying things that Biden and his speech police don’t like.
Key Messages
“Biden Administration officials asked Twitter to ban me because of my tweets questioning the Covid vaccines, even as company employees believed I had followed Twitter’s rules, internal Twitter communications reveal,” Berenson explained at his Unreported Truths Substack.
During a pow-wow with lefitst White House allies, a Twitter employee explained in a message, they asked “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”
Indeed, “top officials targeted me personally” Twitter’s Slack system showed:
Andrew Slavitt, senior advisor to President Biden’s Covid response team, complained specifically about me, according to a Twitter employee in another Slack conversation discussing the White House meeting.
“They really wanted to know about Alex Berenson,” the employee wrote. “Andy Slavitt suggested they had seen data viz [visualization] that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.”
Slavitt’s role suggests that the Biden administration knowingly targeted Berenson.
“The Slack conversations also show the pressure Twitter employees felt internally to respond to the government’s questions about whether the company was doing enough to suppress ‘misinformation’ about Covid and the vaccines,” Berenson continued:
An employee writes that the questions at the meeting were “pointed” but “mercifully, we had answers.”
At the time, employees said internally they did not believe I had broken the company’s rules. “I’ve taken a pretty close look at his account and I don’t think any of it’s violative,” an employee wrote on the Slack conversation a few minutes after the “really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off.”
But the pressure on Twitter to take action against me and other mRNA vaccine skeptics steadily increased after that April meeting, and especially in July and August, as the government began to consider the unprecedented step of mandating Covid vaccines for adults.
That pressure included a bold lie from Biden himself, although the dementia-addled president might not have known what he was saying. Social media, he said on July 16 last year, were “killing people” by publishing vaccine skeptics.
“A few hours after Biden’s comment, Twitter suspended my account for the first time,” Berenson continued:
On August 28, 2021, barely four months after the meeting, Twitter banned me – for a tweet that it has now acknowledged “should not have led to my suspension.”
I obtained the message and other documents related to Twitter’s censorship of me as part of my lawsuit against Twitter over my August 2021 ban. I filed the suit in federal court in San Francisco in December 2021. Twitter and I settled it last month, when Twitter restored my account and acknowledged it had erred in banning me.
The documents contain other revelations, including emails showing that other reporters asked Twitter to take action against me; I will report on those in the future.
Read that again: Other reporters asked Twitter to take action against Berenson.
First Amendment Violation
Granted, Twitter’s banning Berenson was bad enough given that it functions as a public bulletin board and utility. But because it’s a private company it can ban who it wishes.
Not so with Sleepy Joe and his Speech Cops.
“The message, and others, make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech,” Berenson observed:
The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter. But if the companies are acting on behalf of the federal government they can become “state actors” that must allow free speech and debate, just as the government does.
Previous efforts to file state action lawsuits against the government and social media companies for working together to ban users have failed. Courts have universally held that people who have been banned have not shown the specific demands from government officials that are necessary to support state action claims.
Berenson has shown “specific demands.”
Twitter reinstated Berenson in July.
