Emails found in the “Twitter Files” show the same platform, under the previous leadership, worked to label information Carlson published in an opinion article, which was taken directly from the World Health Organization’s website—and subsequently edited out—as “COVID misinformation.”
‘Misleading Information Policy’
An email from Elizabeth Busby, a former Twitter communications staff member, to her “team” questioned whether the op-ed violated Twitter’s “COVID-19 misleading information policy” and qualified for “enforcement.”An internet archive of the WHO web page does show the WHO stated “Children should not be vaccinated for the moment” as of June 22, 2021. WHO officials added in their recommendations “There is not yet enough evidence on the use of vaccines against COVID-19 in children to make recommendations for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults.”
Twitter’s Qualms
The remainder of the first email by Busby included a note that in the past the company had included misinformation labels and measures before a user clicked on a link if the content would “otherwise violate” Twitter policies if the “content were posted directly on Twitter.”“Given Tucker’s visibility, we anticipate there may be some press interest regardless of the enforcement outcome,” Busby wrote, according to the Twitter Files email.
While the WHO website did not state specifically the vaccine was “dangerous” for children, it did clearly state the vaccine was “not recommended for children for the moment” due to a lack of evidence on the use of the COVID-19 vaccines in children.
An “internal only” line of the email stated a link to the article had not yet been posted to the Twitter accounts of Fox News or Carlson, nor had it gained significant traction. However, it added, “given that this article’s narrative is related to ‘big tech censorship,’ I want to be mindful that taking action on the URL level could lead to this particular article gaining more traction rather than mitigating the harm associated with it.”
That employee added Twitter would continue to “keep an eye on any ongoing discussions” relative to the article and that if it gained traction, Twitter would again review the link under their “URL guidelines.”
More Censorship Options Discussed
Twitter’s Senior Policy Specialist for Misinformation, Joseph Guay, also chimed in on the discussion, sharing other options to escalate without directly censoring Fox News.Guay wrote sharing the link itself wouldn’t trigger a misinformation annotation, but Twitter could decide to “remediate the URL” through an unsafe pop-up when a user clicked on a link.
This would have been applied every time someone shared the link, with users having to click through a prompt to accept being directed to the website to read the opinion article, without specifically labeling the link as disinformation or applying other punitive remediation.
For the tweets containing the link to be labeled as vaccine misinformation, the tweet itself would have had to include the supposed misinformation or “advance a similar sentiment as the misleading claims in the op-ed” while linking to the Fox News opinion article.
The note also stated Pfieffer and the team saw importance in that Carlson “at least has [Twitter’s] side of the story” in front of him.