Civics: Stanford’s Virality Project sought to partner with drugmakers before launching a content moderation program blurring lines between “vaccine opposed information” and “misinformation”
Last March, right as Michael Shellenberger and I were preparing to testify in Washington about digital censorship, former NGO worker-turned-Racket-contributor Andrew Lowenthal found Twitter Files emails pertaining to something called the Virality Project. An analog to the earlier “Election Integrity Partnership” content-moderation program that worked with thr Department of Homeland Security and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, the Virality Project’s significance leaped off the page.
“As we continue our work, we would appreciate understanding what content would be most helpful,” Stanford’s Jack Cable wrote to potential platform partners like Twitter on March 17, 2021. He asked if platforms were interested in “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy,” including“true stories of vaccine side effects” or “recent celebrity deaths after vaccine.”
Twitter’s Joseph Guay wrote Cable the next day, March 18th, saying it would be “most interesting for us” to address exactly the sort of true-but-troublesome content Cable described.
Guay listed “unsubstantiated reports of pregnancy-related injury or death,” as well as “concerns that COVID-19 vaccines are ‘experimental,’” the “misuse of official reporting tools and statistical data,” along with “misleading theories regarding escape variants,” and “campaigns against vaccine passports, inciting fear about mandatory immunizations”:
