‘Tucker Twitter Files’ Reveal How WHO Helped Twitter Censor Tucker Carlson
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. The “Tucker Twitter files,” released Thursday by journalist Paul D. Thacker, show that in June 2021, Twitter sought to censor Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson after he published an op-ed stating that the COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous for children. Carlson cited information found on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website — information the WHO “stealth-edited” after Carlson’s commentary
Tucker Carlson made headlines this week for being suddenly ousted by Fox News — but in the latest release of the “Twitter files” the former news commentator made headlines for a different reason.
The documents, titled the “Tucker Twitter files,” released Thursday by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, show that in June 2021, Twitter sought to censor Carlson after he published an op-ed for Fox News saying that the COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous for children.
Carlson’s op-ed cited information that was, up until that point, publicly viewable on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website. However, after Carlson’s op-ed was published, that information disappeared from the site.
The files released Thursday also reveal that Twitter executives held internal debates over how best to censor the content in Carlson’s op-ed — an initiative that was led by a former press secretary for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
In an exclusive interview with The Defender on Thursday, Thacker expounded on the significance of these findings — and hinted at what the next “Twitter files” dump might reveal.
Twitter ‘clipping Tucker Carlson’s wings’
Thacker, who wrote about his findings on his Substack, said that the “bird factory” — referring to Twitter — engaged in “clipping Tucker Carlson’s wings” via its attempted censorship of his op-ed.
Despite being “controversial and polarizing,” Thacker said, Carlson was “One of the few Americans to challenge the official framework of acceptable narratives” and, as such, was “hated by the mainstream reporters for daring to throw darts at liberal pieties.”
“Why did Twitter censor Tucker Carlson? Better yet, who helped Twitter do that?” Thacker asked.
Thacker noted that while he was “reading an endless sea of #TwitterFiles” pertaining to efforts to “censor alleged ‘COVID misinformation,’” he unexpectedly discovered documents detailing attempts to censor Carlson.
These efforts appear to have begun on June 24, 2021, when Elizabeth Busby, a policy communications specialist with “Twitter Comms,” sent an email to colleagues inquiring if an op-ed Carlson had written the previous day should be flagged for COVID-19 “misinformation.”
2. While reading an endless sea of #TwitterFiles, one request to censor alleged "Covid misinformation" stood out: Tucker Carlson.
Tucker is now in the news after Fox announced his departure.
— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) April 27, 2023
In her email, Busby inquired whether links to Carlson’s op-ed “violate our COVID-19 misleading information policy and qualify for enforcement under our URL policy.” She added, “We’ve seen some Tweets with the link … and some that contain counterspeech.”
In the same message, Busby noted that “in the past,” Twitter had applied a boilerplate warning “to sites containing COVID-19 misinfo” and “Given Tucker’s visibility, we anticipate there may be some press interest regardless of the enforcement outcome.”
Thacker discovered that Busby was not just an ordinary Twitter employee. She joined Twitter in 2020, after leaving the U.S. Senate, where she worked as the deputy national press secretary to then-Senate Majority Leader Schumer.
According to Thacker, “Busby’s work history includes a stint at SKDKnickerbocker, a PR and lobby shop closely aligned with the Democratic party. Busby now leads ‘trust and safety communications’ at Twitch.”
He also noted that Schumer was “a frequent critic of Tucker Carlson.”
9. Tucker Carlson would have never known this happened, but when Twitter held a meet and greet months, later, they wrote of Tucker's producer, "[I]t was pretty apparent from the get-go we understood the very different goals we have at work." pic.twitter.com/Uop2l8T66G
— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) April 27, 2023
WHO ‘stealth-edited’ its COVID vaccine guidance for children after Carlson’s op-ed
What was all the fuss about? Carlson’s June 23, 2021, op-ed for Fox News — “The COVID vaccine is dangerous for kids, Big Tech doesn’t want you to know that” — referred to language available on the WHO’s website that explicitly did not recommend the COVID-19 vaccines for children.
In that op-ed, which was adapted from Carlson’s opening commentary on that day’s broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” he referred to then-new guidance from the WHO and also recommendations from medical experts.
Carlson said:
“Since the beginning of the pandemic, key pieces of medical guidance from the World Health Organization have proven to be disastrously false — false enough to cost lives. It was the WHO, you’ll remember, that told us COVID couldn’t be transmitted between people, even as the virus was spreading into the United States. It was the WHO that worked in stealth with the Chinese government to obscure the source of the outbreak at the beginning, and then hide its origins from the world. …
“… bureaucrats at the WHO published new vaccine guidance. Here’s what it says: Children should not take the coronavirus vaccine. Why? The drugs are too dangerous. There’s not nearly enough data to understand the long-term effects or to show that the benefits are worth the risk that they bring.
“This is terrible news, of course, for the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma has been planning to test the vaccine on 6-month-olds.”
According to Thacker, the WHO published an evaluation of vaccine safety and efficacy on April 8, 2021, for the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.
For children, the WHO issued the following recommendation:
“Children should not be vaccinated for the moment. There is not yet enough evidence on the use of vaccines against COVID-19 in children to make recommendations for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
“Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults. However, children should continue to have the recommended childhood vaccines.”
4. Twitter then punished Tucker Carlson for this op-ed.
Tucker actually cited the World Health Organisation's own website which stated that the WHO was NOT recommending children get the COVID vax. pic.twitter.com/BKnMnyqbPV
— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) April 27, 2023
Twitter sought to censor Carlson while avoiding ‘political risks’
According to Thacker, the day after the WHO “stealth-edited” its vaccine guidance, Twitter officials began discussing Tucker’s essay — after Busby brought it to their attention.
Twitter employee Brian Clarke responded to Busby’s June 24, 2021, email that same day, writing, “We are going to proceed with labeling any Tweets linking to the article we detect that advance the claim that WHO has deemed the vaccine dangerous for children.”
However, Clarke said, “Given that this article’s narrative is related to ‘big tech censorship’, I want to be mindful that taking action on the URL level could lead to this particular article gaining more traction rather than mitigating the harm associated with it.
5. When I looked back at the WHO website, I found they stealth edited their page to remove this passage stating they did not recommend kids get vaccinated. pic.twitter.com/hyf7X0gcRc
— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) April 27, 2023
“We’re going to keep an eye on any ongoing discussions related to the article and if it happens to gain traction we will review again under our URL guidelines,” Clarke added.
According to Thacker, “Twitter officials also discussed looping in top Twitter execs, such as the general counsel, due to the ‘political risks’ associated with such actions. Yoel Roth [then-head of Trust and Safety for Twitter] agreed with this approach to ‘escalate.’”
This included a recommendation that then-general counsel for Twitter Vijaya Gadde review any actions taken against Fox News, “given political risks,” while Roth stated that any action against Fox would be “escalated” internally within Twitter.
Joseph Guay, at the time Twitter’s senior policy specialist for “misinformation,” then shared an email with Busby, Clarke and other Twitter personnel, advising them on various options they had available to them to take action against tweets containing a link to Carlson’s op-ed, without directly censoring Fox News.
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