Moderna’s “Disinformation Department” monitors 150 million websites for “anti-vaccine” narratives
Here I summarized, translated and edited this article written by
Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. recently published in The Defender
Through a nonprofit funded by drugmakers and Talkwalker, a “social listening” company, the Moderna team, led by a 20-year former FBI veteran, deploys artificial intelligence to monitor everything from mainstream media from communication to gaming sites.
Moderna’s “disinformation department” partnered with a pharmaceutical industry-backed nonprofit, Public Good Projects (PGP), to monitor and suppress dissenting voices on COVID-19 vaccine policy, according to a new report by investigative journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson published Monday in Unherded.
Over the past year, the “Twitter Files,” two lawsuits against the Biden administration and other investigations have exposed cases of collusion between the government, social media and universities to suppress dissenting speech on COVID-19 policies, accusations of electoral fraud and other issues.
This is an illustrative Twitter:
Jay Bhattacharya
@DrJBhattacharya
This report by @lhfang and Jack Poulson in @unherd is absolute fire. Moderna, thru the Public Goods Project pays thousands of health professionals to attack and defame vaccine critics and push social media to censor anyone who says things, true or false, that reduce profits.
Lee Fang
@lhfang
Moderna is spying on you.
This new report sheds light on Moderna’s behind-the-scenes strategy within this new media landscape. It exposes the key players and how they worked to monitor 150 million websites to censor speech that undermines the company’s COVID-19 vaccine narrative and actively shape public discourse to benefit Moderna’s bottom line.
Great Barrington Declaration co-author and Stanford University professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was blacklisted by Twitter, praised the new report in a tweet:
Moderna had never successfully brought any product to market before the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and was on the brink of collapse when the pandemic was announced.
Its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine transformed the drugmaker into a $100 billion company almost overnight and turned its CEO, chairman and co-founders into billionaires.
Today, as public interest in purchasing other booster tanks and federal subsidies for injection are waning, so are profits, leading the company to invest in new strategies, such as an eye-catching marketing campaign. , to stay afloat, Fang and Poulson reported.
Moderna is also doubling down on work started during the pandemic to attack vaccine dissent and steer vaccination policy, investigative journalists found.
In fact, Moderna today employs former law enforcement agents, such as Nikki Rutman, a 20-year FBI veteran who worked for the agency in Boston during Operation Warp Speed, where her job was to conduct weekly meetings. cybersecurity with Moderna.
He now heads Moderna’s global intelligence division, part of the department that spearheads Moderna’s work to stop “disinformation,” producing reports that flag “anti-vaccine narratives” online and recommending whether and how to address them.
The department works with the PGP, funded largely through a $1.27 million grant from the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a biotech lobby group that represents Pfizer and Moderna.
Through PGP and Talkwalker, a “social listening” company, the Moderna team monitors everything from major media outlets to gaming sites, deploying artificial intelligence to monitor 150 million websites around the world for conversations related to vaccines.
The team issues reports to Moderna staff that color-code “anti-vaccine narratives” by risk level. Low-risk narratives “currently do not justify any action.” For higher-risk narratives, the team “will notify appropriate stakeholders with recommendations,” Lee and Poulson wrote.
Analyzing sample reports, journalists found that examples of “high-risk” posts included a video posted by Elon Musk mocking countless claims that vaccines were “100% effective” along with a series of posts made by the comedian and political commentator Russell Brand. who was singled out in September for his “anti-vaccine” beliefs.
The Moderna team also raised concerns about appearance when tennis star Novak Djokovic, who refused the COVID-19 vaccine, won the US Open sponsored by Moderna.
Lee and Paulson reported that Moderna was not concerned with the veracity of any of the claims made in the posts it flagged, only their effects.
“None of the reports we have seen attempt to dispute the claims made,” they wrote. “Rather, claims are automatically considered ‘misinformation’ if they encourage vaccine hesitancy.”
Moderna first began working with PGP in 2021-2022 on a program called “Stronger,” where the nonprofit “identified misinformation and shaped content decisions on social media.”
PGP was able to do this effectively because it had “backdoor access” to Twitter data, through a “firehose,” which provides real-time access to all tweets on the platform for analysis and data mining. on a large scale.
PGP, which worked directly with Twitter to develop its policies around the pandemic, would send Twitter lists of accounts to expand or censor.
Twitter’s general counsel also advised the US Department of Homeland Security’s task force on combating disinformation to work with PGP on issues related to COVID-19 speech.
Lee and Poulson also found that PGP distributed talking points and tips on how to respond to vaccine misinformation to a network of 45,000 health professionals.
“The intention [de Moderna]”, as we have deduced from the emails exchanged, was not only to combat disinformation, but also to affect the content and tenor of public debate,” Fang and Paulson wrote.
This year, as acceptance numbers for COVID-19 booster doses plummeted, Moderna and PGP launched a new collaboration, this time working with the American Board of Internal Medicine, to develop a training program called “Program “infodemic training” to train health workers to identify “medical misinformation.”
Despite public outrage over social media censorship, a clear lack of interest in continuing to receive booster shots, and the official end to the pandemic announced in May by the Biden administration, Moderna continues to expand its surveillance operation.
Internal alerts analyzed by Fang and Poulson reveal that the company is closely monitoring laws and politicians seeking to restrict vaccine mandates and that it continues to flag messages posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, by Musk, who, according to Moderna , “increasingly uses that platform to elevate fringe vaccine opponents and conspiracy theorists.”
The authors wrote:
“The network of fact-checking nonprofits has grown at an industrial pace, providing opaque opportunities for public and private interests to take subtle control over public discourse. Such sophistication in combining public health messages and corporate advertising should worry anyone interested in how the government controls free speech.”
Ronald Palacios Castrillo
2023-11-30 16:59:57
#Modernas #Disinformation #Department #monitors #million #websites #antivaccine #narratives
