Joseph Guay, a former Twitter senior policy specialist for “misinformation,” shared an email with Elizabeth Busby, a policy communications specialist with “Twitter Comms”, employee Brian Clarke and other Twitter personnel, advising them on various options they had available to them to take action against tweets containing a link to Tucker Carlson’s op-ed, without directly censoring Fox News.

Investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker noted that Guay, who “seems to have made the [final] call on Tucker’s op-ed,” departed Twitter earlier this year for a position as TikTok’s “Global Policy Lead on Deceptive Actors & Behaviours.”

Upon departing Twitter, Guay, in a post on his LinkedIn page, referred to his work at Twitter policing “the bad guys”: “Our teams worked tirelessly to ship bold new policies (such as the Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy, or the Crisis Misinformation Policy) to prevent virulent misinformation and cognitive manipulation from bringing harm to vulnerable people.

“I remain as committed as ever to building resiliency to weaponised information, and making it a little harder for the bad guys.”

Guay’s LinkedIn profile states he is engaged in “fighting information threats globally.” Thacker also noted that Twitter’s apparent distaste for Carlson was evident in more than just this instance.

“Tucker Carlson would have never known this happened, but when Twitter held a meet and greet months, later, they wrote of Tucker’s producer, ‘[I]t was pretty apparent from the get-go we understood the very different goals we have at work,’” Thacker tweeted, referencing internal Twitter documents regarding a meeting between Twitter officials and Alex Pfeiffer, Carlson’s producer.

Thacker wrote: “Months after Twitter took action against tweets advancing claims in Tucker’s essay, the company met with reporters in New York to strengthen ties with journalists covering social media.

“In their assessment of reporters, one Twitter official noted of Tucker’s producer, Alex Pfeiffer, ‘[I]t was pretty apparent from the get-go we understood the very different goals we have at work; this was mainly to relationship build.’”

In remarks he shared with The Defender, Thacker noted that Twitter was attempting to strike a balancing act between censoring Carlson’s narrative while not running afoul of Fox.

“They were trying to limit Tucker Carlson’s impact,” he said, “and they were doing it in a way that they would not be brought into direct conflict with Fox.”

According to Thacker, this balancing act nevertheless belied Twitter’s political bias.

“There’s this issue they had with conservative media, and they’re biased in one direction,” Thacker told The Defender. “The way you know this is that the person who brings it to their attention is the former deputy national press secretary of Sen Chuck Schumer.”

Thacker said that while some of what Carlson had written in his op-ed was “inflammatory,” it nevertheless “wasn’t inaccurate.” He added:

“The WHO edited its website on the same day Tucker’s article came out and the next day, Twitter starts to go after his story. What do you say about that? Who does Twitter work for?

“Apparently, you don’t question the WHO, or you don’t write what the WHO says. It shows you that you cannot trust these social media people. They are in the tank in one direction.”

Furthering this point, Thacker highlighted a potential conflict of interest between Twitter and one of the Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers, J&J. In Thacker’s previous “Twitter files” revelations, he found that Twitter partnered with J&J on a Covid-19 vaccine “marketing strategy.”

Such efforts were not limited to Covid-19 vaccines. “By the summer of 2021,” Thacker wrote as part of his previous “Twitter Files” release, “Johnson & Johnson began a full court press to market a tonne of their products on Twitter, including a controversial antidepressant.”

“I don’t know what else is influencing Twitter,” Thacker told The Defender. “Johnson & Johnson was one of the vaccines mentioned on the WHO site and that was a client of Twitter’s.”

Remarking on the revelations made in the “Tucker Twitter Files,” Michael Rectenwald, author of Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom and a former New York University liberal studies professor, told The Defender:

“This instalment of the Twitter files proves that not only the government but also international governance bodies like the WHO established direct censorship channels within Twitter – to censor information that contradicted the narrative of vaccine safety, even when ‘the science’ contradicted the narrative.

“No doubt we will learn that international NGOs like the World Economic Forum also had such channels.”

Rectenwald was a guest on the final “Tucker Carlson Originals” broadcast on Fox News before Carlson was let go by the network.

Indeed, in several instances, the WHO has partnered with social media platforms such as Twitter to police alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation” pertaining to Covid-19 vaccines and countermeasures — and has also previously expressed misgivings about Elon Musk’s plans to allow more “free speech” on the platform.

Dr Mike Ryan, executive of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, stated on April 26, 2022 – when Musk was contemplating purchasing Twitter – that Musk will have a “huge influence” over the curbing and potential spreading of vaccine misinformation on Twitter and that Twitter and all social media platforms must address “misinformation.”

Thacker compared Twitter’s actions to what Noam Chomsky once described as “manufacturing consent.” Chomsky described manufacturing consent in a 2018 interview, during which he said:

“The myth is that the media are independent, adversarial, courageous, struggling against power.

“That’s actually true of some. There are often very fine reporters, correspondents. In fact, the media does a fine job, but within a framework that determines what to discuss, not to discuss.”

However, in an October 24, 2021, interview, Chomsky suggested that unvaccinated individuals should be isolated, claiming they were placing the public at risk.

Chomsky said at the time: “If people decide ‘I am willing to be a danger to the community by refusing the vaccine’ they should then say, ‘well, I also have the decency to isolate myself. I don’t want a vaccine but I don’t have the right to run around harming people.’

“That should be a convention. Enforcing is a different question. It should be understood, and we should try to get it to be understood. If it really reaches the point where they are severely endangering people, then of course you have to do something about it.”

In a follow-up interview, Chomsky doubled down on his previous remarks. “How can we get food to them? Well, that’s actually their problem.”

On his Substack, Thacker noted that the media’s response to the recent news that Carlson was ousted from Fox News is characteristic of what Chomsky had once warned about. He wrote:

“The majority of reporters have shrugged aside their colleagues’ reporting fiascos and the damage done to their own reputations and continue to blame most failures in journalism on one person: Tucker Carlson.

“So, it was not surprising that reporters began a week-long celebration this Monday when Fox fired Tucker.”

Referring to the latest Twitter Files revelations about Carlson, Thacker told The Defender, “I can’t believe this is not everywhere, that everyone is not reading this right now.”

He said he will soon release more documents as part of the “Twitter Files”: “There are more stories. I had another story that I was working on and I pushed that aside to work on this one. There’s probably another 10 stories, with more examples of the way they were working with the media, especially the media they favoured.”

• The Defender report / By Michael Nevradakis, a senior reporter for The Defender based in Athens, Greece