Twitter Files: The Muzzling of Charlie Kirk
<< Mr. Kirk rose even further into the conservative stratosphere during the early days of the pandemic, when he was quick to attack the World Health Organization — which, in his typical fashion, he called the “Wuhan Health Organization” — accusing it of hiding the source of the Covid virus and claiming that it had emerged from a Chinese lab in the city of Wuhan. He later rallied opposition to school lockdowns and mask mandates.
He was so vocal in his willingness to spread unsupported claims and outright lies — he said that the drug hydroxychloroquine was “100 percent effective” in treating the virus, which it is not — that Twitter temporarily barred him in early March 2020. But that move only added to his notoriety and seemed to support his claim that he was being muzzled by a liberal elite.
The notion that Kirk was “so vocal” in his willingness to spread “unsupported claims and outright lies” that it led to his temporary banning on Twitter seemed a strange thing to emphasize in an obituary. The quote about hydroxychloroquine being “100 percent effective” notwithstanding, Kirk wasn’t wrong (or demonstrably wrong, anyway) to criticize the WHO, lockdowns, or mask mandates. The Times also likely should have been more circumspect about its own performance in contemporaneous stories like “ For Charlie Kirk, Conservative Activist, the Virus is a Cudgel,” when the paper complained about his use of phrases like “China virus” and his tweeting of a list of pre-Covid diseases named after the location of the first cases (Zika, West Nile Virus, Ebola, etc). But was Kirk “muzzled by a liberal elite”?
According to Twitter Files documents, “muzzled” might be a strong word, but “targeted” would be accurate. One episode, in which an effort was made to remove Kirk and Benny Johnson just before the 2020 Presidential Election, stands out. Twitter understood this was a high-profile decision and copied the top executives in the firm, as well as Twitter’s “US GOV TEAM,” on its decision-making process. In the most damning sequence, Twitter went from having zero interest to actioning hundreds of accounts linked to Kirk within hours, after receiving a query from The Washington Post. >>
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