In his continuing sequel of Twitter Files investigative journalist Matt Taibbi reveals how the US government-supported Virality Project and “encouraged platforms to target people, not posts, using “Minority Report”-style “pre-crime logic,” and neuter “repeat offenders” such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr, chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defence (CHD), who post a “large volume of content that is almost always reportable.”

This system “worked with government to launch a pan-industry monitoring plan for COVID-related content,” Taibbi wrote.

“Although the Virality Project reviewed content on a mass scale for Twitter, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Medium, TikTok and Pinterest, it knowingly targeted true material and legitimate political opinion, while often being factually wrong itself,” Taibbi said.

In March 2021, the Virality Project began to “ramp up” these efforts, providing “visibility” to “alternative platforms such as Gab, Parler, Telegram and Gettr,” in what Taibbi describes as “near-total surveillance of the social media landscape.”

Speaking Friday on the “America This Week” podcast, Taibbi likened this to a social credit score system, saying: “You could say something and get banned for it on one platform, and now all the other platforms know about that. And so, your history will be fed into this big computer. It’s kind of like the social credit score system.”

According to the Virality Project’s final report, it sought to develop a “whole-of-society effort … in which stakeholders build robust and persistent partnerships to ensure that significant high-harm claims can be addressed as they arise,” by bringing together research institutions, public health “partners,” government “partners” and platforms.

On his podcast, Taibbi suggested such collusion between the Virality Project and multiple social media platforms “would be an antitrust issue.” In fact, on January 10, CHD and others sued the Trusted News Initiative and its founders, including the BBC, The Associated Press, Reuters and The Washington Post, for colluding to exclude non-establishment Covid-19-related narratives.

“Reportable” content, according to the Virality Project, even included information straight from government agencies such as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on the basis of who was sharing it and the political narrative they espoused, according to Taibbi: Other examples of social media content targeted by the Virality Project and shared by Taibbi include: “The release of Dr Anthony Fauci’s Spring 2020 emails… has been used to exacerbate distrust in Dr Fauci.” “Increased distrust in Fauci’s expert guidance.”

“Reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway”; “natural immunity”; suggesting Covid-19 “leaked from a lab”; even “worrisome jokes.”

According to Taibbi, the Virality Project was influential in Twitter changing its Covid-19 content policies “in partnership with the CDC.”

On February 17, 2021, Twitter joined the Virality Project, instructing Twitter executives like Yoel Roth, then-head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, on how to join the common ticketing system.

The Virality Project also “routinely framed real testimonials about side effects as misinformation, ranging from ‘true stories’ of blood clots from AstraZeneca vaccines to a New York Times story about vaccine recipients who contracted the blood disorder thrombocytopenia,” according to Taibbi.

Twitter — in conjunction with the US State Department’s Global Engagement Centre – went on to brand numerous accounts that posted “legitimate and accurate Covid-19 updates” but which “attacked” US and European politicians, as “Russia-linked.”

Even pro-Covid-19-restriction politicians, such as former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, were accused of being part of such “Russia-linked” networks. Conte is currently being investigated in Italy for not imposing a lockdown quickly enough in March 2020, according to Politico.

The Virality Project also gauged “audience response” as a means to ascertain whether content posted on social media qualified as “disinformation” or not. In one example:

From the point of view of the Virality Project, even “just asking questions” was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation,” while a “Worldwide Rally for Freedom planned over Telegram” was itself branded “a disinformation event.”

In another email to Twitter about “misinformation,” the Virality Project said it wanted to “hone in” on an “increasingly popular narrative about natural immunity,” while describing “breakthrough” infections as “extremely rare events” that should not be inferred to mean “vaccines are ineffective.”

A few months later though, the Virality Project conceded that “breakthrough cases are happening.”

Anyone posting content on social media suggesting vaccines and vaccine passports are components of a “surveillance state” did not escape observation by the Virality Project. According to Taibbi, the organization “ran searches for the term ‘surveillance state,’” categorising such content as “conspiracy.”

Even while conceding that “breakthrough infections were happening,” the Virality Project’s final report continued to claim that “it was misinformation to suggest the vaccine does not prevent transmission, or that governments are planning to introduce vaccine passports,” even though “Both things turned out to be true,” Taibbi said.

The same report, modified 10 times since publication – most recently on December 5, 2022 – was open to personal narratives, as long as they were pro-vaccine. The report suggested government entities could “mix personal stories about the vaccine’s benefits with support from data.”

For Taibbi, the revelations about the Virality Project are important for two reasons: “One, as Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success. Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organised quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.

“Two, it accelerated the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.”

“The Virality Project was specifically not based on ‘assertions of fact,’ but public submission to authority, acceptance of narrative, and pronouncements by figures like Anthony Fauci. The project’s central/animating concept was, ‘You can’t handle the truth,’” Taibbi concluded.

The Virality Project appears to have remained largely inactive ever since the publication of its final report in February 2022. However, its content and recommendations remain online.

In its “Expectations and Action Plan for Health Communicators,” for instance, the Virality Project warns that “established pseudoscience and anti-vaccination communities will continue to create, spread and iterate on narratives intended to dissuade the public from getting a Covid-19 vaccine.”

“As the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines continues, minimising vaccine hesitancy in the general public will be critical to bring an end to the coronavirus pandemic. Following the three C’s model about vaccine hesitancy … all three factors – complacency, confidence, and convenience – play a role in promoting vaccine uptake,” it added.

The Virality Project went on to cite narratives surrounding the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron as an example of such “misinformation,” claiming that his death was as a result of natural causes and not due to Covid-19 vaccination – even though he passed away two weeks after receiving his first dose.

The White House targeted a tweet posted by Kennedy on January 22, 2021, about Aaron’s death, calling upon Twitter to remove it, while on January 31, 2021, Kennedy’s tweet was “fact-checked” by the Times, on the basis that a medical examiner said Aaron’s death was unrelated to his vaccination.

However, Kennedy said that in a conversation he had with the Fulton County medical examiner subsequent to the publication of that article, the medical examiner claimed he had never examined Hank Aaron’s body. A subsequent letter Kennedy wrote to the Times was never published.

Claiming that “anti-vaccine activists and vaccine-hesitant influencers seize on uncertainty about the Covid-19 vaccines’ effect on transmission … to argue that the vaccine is ineffective” and “leverage misleading reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway, attempting to increase scepticism about the vaccine’s efficacy,” the Virality Project also called for “pre-bunk” strategies against such content.

“Pre-bunking” is intended to warn the public of purported “misinformation” before it spreads.

As part of such apparent pre-bunking, on April 17, 2021, Virality Project paper issued four days after the suspension of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine by the CDC and the FDA said the number of incidents of “rare and severe type[s] of blood clot[s]” (six) was “very small.”

Suggesting that the suspension of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine may “spur hesitancy,” the paper put forth strategies that would attempt to counteract efforts by those questioning the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines to use this suspension as an argument in support of such a narrative.

In a February 11, 2021, paper, the Virality Project also evaluated the Covid-19-related content policies of nine social media platforms, calling for “policy clarity and transparency,” and “interventions and counter-narratives,” among other suggestions.

The Virality Project also warned about the dangers of “global circulation” prolonging “the longevity of misinformation,” about how Russia and China were purportedly attempting to “influence US vaccine conversations” and how social media narratives questioning the Covid-19 vaccines were “undermining authoritative health sources.”

The Biden administration’s collaboration with the Virality Project was not the first time it was found to be utilizing Covid-19-related talking points from private actors. Documents revealed the Biden administration received talking points from a prominent polling firm, Impact Research, regarding how it could “take the win over Covid-19.”

Many of these talking points were included in Biden’s March 2022 State of the Union address.

Taibbi, one of the foremost publishers of Twitter Files revelations, was attacked by Democratic lawmakers while testifying before the House March 9. This included demands that he reveal his sources, and characterisations that he is a “so-called journalist” on the payroll of Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk.

• A Tell / The Defender report / By Michael Nevradakis, a senior reporter for The Defender