Twitter allowed America\u2019s biggest pharmaceutical companies to spread misinformation that hurt their competitors, according to a new batch of the Twitter Files released by Lee Fang, a journalist for the Intercept.
\nIn the latest batch of the Twitter Files, Fang explains how Twitter censorship was utilized by pharmaceutical giants as part of their broader strategy to ensure smaller competitors and companies focused on therapeutics could not damage their extremely profitable coronavirus vaccine business.
\n1. New piece from the TWITTER FILES.
\nHow the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy.
\nThe push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries.
\n\u2014 Lee Fang (@lhfang)\u00a0January 16, 2023
\nThis strategy included fending off efforts to water down strict intellectual property laws inhibiting the sharing of patents for coronavirus vaccines and treatments.
\n\u201cGlobal drug giants saw the crisis as an opportunity for unprecedented profit,\u201d wrote Fang. \u201cBehind 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.\u201d
\nIn addition to suppressing content that posed a threat to their dominance over coronavirus treatments, lobbyists for the pharma giants also spread exaggerated claims on Twitter about the costs of watering down intellectual property regulations related to treatment development. Twitter took no action to curtail this activity.
\n\u201cNotably, 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 [the pharmaceutical industry\u2019s content moderation project] did nothing. The rules applied only to critics of industry.\u201d
\nThe latest Twitter Files batch about coronavirus censorship comes amid news that Moderna, a leading American producer of COVID-19 vaccines,\u00a0is planning to charge over $100 for the vaccine.<\/p>\n