On Tuesday of this week, as is almost customary, I annoyed some readers. I wrote a piece about the tragic death of Tipperary Hurler Dillon Quirke in which I said that it was wrong, in my view, for so many people on the internet to be connecting his death to the Covid 19 vaccines without any evidence at all for their claims. The vaccines, I said, had proven disappointingly ineffective relative to how they were advertised to the public, and they had also proven less safe than initially advertised. But there remains, I wrote, a stubborn lack of evidence supporting those who claim online that the vaccines are responsible for widespread ill-health and deaths.
On Wednesday, my colleague Fatima Gunning reported a straight news story: That the European Medicines Agency had issued a warning that was to be attached to the newest covid 19 vaccine, Novavax, linking that product to ailments of the heart: Myocarditis, and pericarditis. The story had been reported widely in other news outlets, including by Reuters, and the Irish Independent.
So far, so bland.
But both stories, this week, were flagged by twitter as “misleading”. Members of the public were banned from retweeting them, liking them, or replying to them. A large warning label was added to them on our twitter account, telling people to take care and redirecting readers to Twitter’s vaccines page, which contains all the latest information from “official sources”.
Gript is, of course, an official source.
This annoys some people no end, and they’d deny it fiercely, but the fact is that this outlet is a member of the Press Council of Ireland. We are bound – and committed to – the Press Council’s standards for reporting, accuracy, differentiating news and opinion (this piece, for example, is opinion) and authenticating information before we make it public. If there is anybody out there who feels that we do not abide by those standards, and that we have published something that is not true, or bigoted, or dangerously misleading, they are free to make a complaint, which will be independently adjudicated by the Press Ombudsman. That is fair, and that is how all of this should work.
But it is not how twitter works, nor how other social media companies work.
How they work, in fact, is something of a mystery. Who do you complain to, in Ireland, if you are treated unfairly by a social media company? If Gript, or the Irish Independent, treats you unfairly, the Press Council is there. If a bus driver treats you unfairly, you can complain to his or her employer. If it’s a doctor, the medical council. But social media companies are an all-powerful black box.
At the last American election, for example, Twitter shut down the New York Post. That newspaper – much larger than Gript, or any Irish outlet – was banned from tweeting. It was locked out of its own twitter account. Its reporting was denounced – by twitter itself – as false. All because the New York Post had reported the contents of a laptop owned by now-President Biden’s son. That story turned out to be absolutely true.
And of course it did: Like any other media outlet, the New York Post has standards. It has been in operation for a century. It is trusted by its readers. It has earned the right – more so than we have – to be granted the presumption that what it prints is true. Twitter, by contrast, has been around for 15 years, and is bound by no journalistic standards whatsoever.
Twitter has never apologised for the error. It never will.
Yesterday, Fatima’s story had the “warning” label that was put on it lifted. In part, I suspect, because I flagged it directly to Sinead McSweeney, twitter’s head of public policy. I did not flag the warning on my own story, and that one, of course, remains in place.
Because there is no insight into the process, or how twitter decides these things, we can only speculate as to how it makes the decisions it makes. But we can observe the pattern of those decisions: You are much more likely to be flagged, for example, for reporting something that conflicts with the progressive political worldview than the conservative one. Does anyone for one moment think, for example, that the New York Post would have been shut down for reporting the contents of Eric Trump’s laptop?
We know that twitter’s moderation teams tend to be young graduates, few if any of them with journalism training. It is abundantly clear that many of them make decisions based on vibes, not evidence.
The problem is twofold: First, that we have granted such power in society to private entities who are accountable to nobody but their shareholders, and second, that the biases of those entities tend to align almost perfectly with the biases of the progressive establishment, and big corporate entities. On vaccines, for example, the social media line appears to be that unless it comes directly from the PR department of Pfizer, it is potential misinformation.
The tragedy for progressivism, and for all of us, is that this is likely to backfire, even more than it already has. This process was conceived, I think, to foster trust in information. But as it becomes abused, more and more egregiously, it is having the opposite effect. Companies like Twitter and Facebook, by becoming so devoted to “official sources”, are actually having the effect of reducing people’s trust in official sources. When you tell people that they cannot talk about things, they don’t hear that you are trustworthy. They hear that you want something not to be talked about, and they wonder why. By trying to grip the control of information so tightly, they will watch it slip through their fingers.
In the meantime, we’ll keep saying what we think, and what we know, about vaccines and everybody else. And unlike twitter, if you don’t like our decisions, you know where you can complain to.