Twitter allowed America's largest pharmaceutical companies to spread false information that harmed their competitors, according to a new chapter in the Twitter files released by Intercept reporter Lee Fang.
Fang explained how Twitter censorship has been used by pharmaceutical giants as part of their strategy to prevent smaller competitors and companies focused on therapies from harming their highly profitable coronavirus vaccine business.
That strategy included fending off efforts to dilute strict intellectual property laws that prevent the sharing of patents for coronavirus vaccines and treatments.
"Global pharmaceutical giants saw the crisis as an unprecedented opportunity for profit," Fang wrote.
"Behind closed doors, the pharmaceutical industry has launched a brutal lobbying campaign to squash any effort to share patents on new covid-related drugs, including therapeutics and vaccines."
Twitter censorship was also part of this strategy. BioNTech, developer of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine, has asked the tech platform to censor users who request cheap vaccines.
In addition to suppressing content that threatens their control over coronavirus treatments, lobbyists for pharmaceutical giants have also spread exaggerated claims on Twitter about the costs of diluting intellectual property rules related to treatment development. Twitter has taken no steps to curb this activity.
“Remarkably, this massive pressure to censor and label covid misinformation never applied to pharmaceutical companies. When big pharma wildly exaggerated the risks of creating cheap covid vaccines, Stronger [the pharmaceutical industry's content moderation project] did nothing. The rules only applied to critics of the industry.”
All of this, the Twitter files about the coronavirus censorship, came to light when it was also revealed that Moderna, a leading US manufacturer of the COVID-19 vaccine, plans to charge more than $100 for the vaccine.
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