Tales of vaccine injury were purged from the internet

The Australian’s expose of the post-Covid vaccination death of Amy Sedgwick would have been taken down if it had emerged in 2021.

According to the latest batch of internal Twitter documents, a Stanford-based group called the Virality Project, working closely with US government agencies to censor posts that would have promoted “Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy”. Picture: AFP

The Australian’s expose of the post-Covid vaccination death of Amy Sedgwick on Saturday would have been purged from the internet if it had emerged in 2021, under pressure from US-government funded ‘information experts’ working in partnership with Silicon Valley social media giants.

A ‘censorship-industrial complex’ of US taxpayer-backed NGOs, Stanford University academics worked in partnership with Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Google (YouTube), and Pinterest to take down or flag as misinformation “stories of true vaccine side effects”, discussion of “natural immunity” and the possibility Sars-Cov2 leaked from a lab.

According to the latest batch of internal Twitter documents released by its new owner Elon Musk, who promised to shed light on the company’s censorship efforts, a Stanford-based group called the Virality Project, working closely with US government agencies, co-ordinated an industry wide effort to censor posts that would have promoted “Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy”.

23-year-old Amy Sedgwick‘s family believe she died as a result of her reaction to the Pfizer vaccine.

“It absolutely would have been taken down under Virality guidelines,” said Andrew Lowenthal, an Australian digital rights advocate who worked with veteran American journalist Matt Taibbi to unearth the latest batch of Twitter Files, released last week and dubbed the Great Covid Lie Machine.

“Had Kerryn Phelps taken to Twitter to describe her and her wife’s vaccine injuries, these too would have been labelled misinformation,” he told The Australian, referring to revelations in January about the former AMA head’s vaccine injuries.

Starting in early 2021 the Virality Project, working alongside Pentagon-funded Graphika and people with strong ties to the US department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, trawled hundreds of millions of social media posts daily using advanced AI in order to flag “potential violations” and “misinformation events”.

These included posts that discussed “breakthrough infections”, “celebrity deaths after vaccination” or criticism of Anthony Fauci, after a trove of the US government’s top Covid-19 adviser’s emails from early 2020 were released under Freedom of Information laws, suggesting he didn’t believe masks were effective to stop the spread of respiratory viruses.

In March 2021 Virality told Twitter it was flagging posts “concern about vaccine passports” (which were later introduced in many US cities), “fear of mandatory immunisations” (the US government afterwards made them compulsory for all private sector workers until the Supreme Court overturned the order), and “true stories about people experiencing blood clots”.

In June 2021 the group told Twitter it would “hone in” on an “increasingly popular narrative about natural immunity” (which research later established was at least as satisfactory as Covid-19 vaccination).

“The moral depravity is astounding and quite possibly criminal,” Mr Lowenthal, a former fellow at Harvard‘s Berkman Klein Centre for internet and Society, told The Australian.

“The Virality Project is just part of a broader cultural shift that reverses long standing liberal/left commitments to free expression and allows censorship in the name of protection and safety”.

The Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the groups involved in the speech crackdown, said Mr Taibbi’s claims were “inaccurate and based on distortions of email exchanges in the Twitter Files”.

Since acquiring Twitter in October Mr Musk has given journalists access to internal company documents which have revealed a high degree of communication between US government agencies, including the FBI, and the social media giant over decisions to ban stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop (which turned out to be true), doctors who disagreed with lockdowns, and former president Donald Trump.

Media stories about vaccine injuries and their censorship have started to proliferate in the US amid greater candour by regulators and governments about the possibility of vaccine side effects, including death.

Florida’s health department in February revealed reports of “life-threatening conditions increased over 4,400 per cent” since the roll out of Covid-19 vaccines in 2021.

Ernest Ramirez, whose 16-year-old son died five days after his Covid vaccination from an enlarged heart in April 2021, had his GoFundMe page to raise money for the funeral taken off the internet in 2021.

In January two polls of Americans found almost a 60 per cent wanted congress to investigate the safety of Covid-19 vaccines and 7 per cent, or around 12 million, said they had experienced a “major side effect” after receiving one of the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson and Johnson Covid-19 shots.