Documents obtained by Michael Shellenberger as part of the Twitter Files revealed that Twitter leadership disagreed over banning Alex Berenson, further fueling his claim that Twitter had no justification to ban his account.
Berenson was banned from Twitter in August 2021 for violating the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy.
“The newly revealed secret debate inside Twitter’s former leadership highlights the still-unanswered question of whether Twitter banned me because it feared government or corporate retribution for allowing me to continue to publish on its site,” Berenson tweeted, after reviewing the evidence he received from Shellenberger.
There was already evidence that the Biden administration and a Pfizer board member wanted to have Berenson censored. According to Berenson, after reviewing the documents, Twitter lawyers concluded that they could not win against the lawsuit Berenson filed to get his account reinstated. However, the reason the account was banned in the first place is not clear.
Berenson, tweeted that the issue is “central to Berenson v Biden, my new lawsuit against the @WhiteHouse and @Pfizer for allegedly conspiring to violate my First Amendment rights by coercing Twitter to ban me.”
The documents “troubled” Twitter lawyers enough for them to advise Twitter to settle the lawsuit “rather than risk them becoming public – even if the company had to agree to most of my demands.”
When Twitter restored Berenson’s account, it admitted it made a mistake but did not explain why the account was banned in the first place. According to Berenson, they refused to explain because the justification for banning his account would not hold up in court.
He tweeted: “The company faced a stark choice, Rubbo concluded in analyzing a potential settlement: ‘Are we willing to litigate and risk the potential public disclosure of many documents in order to prevent disclosure of some of them now?’”
