“What Elon Musk did is, by buying Twitter, he severed ties between Twitter officials and some very privileged journalists who had exclusive or premier access to Twitter,” says Paul D. Thacker, an investigative reporter and Twitter Files journalist.
Thacker recently revealed a number of relationships between Twitter staff and certain journalists, pharmaceutical companies, and government officials that dealt with censoring content and have national implications for the First Amendment.
“In late 2021, Twitter had a meeting up in New York with a bunch of journalists, and afterwards, they profiled what these reporters wanted and what Twitter could expect in return,” explains Thacker. “And they said that what this meeting was about was to solidify relationships for intel sharing, and they called it ‘for our trusted partners.’”
Having allegedly received hundreds of millions in advertising revenue from big pharma, social media companies were under tremendous pressure during the pandemic to censor even “true content” related to the COVID-19 genetic vaccines.
“They didn’t care about whether [what Tucker Carlson] had written was right or not. What they were concerned about was that people might begin to think that maybe these vaccines were not safe,” says Thacker.
