Moderna is Spying on You

Investigative journalist Lee Fang and researcher Jack Poulson explain how the company used sophisticated AI and censorship/propaganda pressure to push their product and silence critics.

In what they are calling the Moderna Reports, detailed in recent articles for Unherd and RealClearInvestigations, Twitter Files journalist Lee Fang and researcher Jack Poulson dig into Moderna’s deployment of mass surveillance, internet censorship, and massive propaganda. As the company’s profits tanked when people stopped taking endless mRNA booster shots, Moderna employed a firm that went far beyond typical corporate PR tactics to engage in massive efforts to silence critics of its only marketable product. As Fang and Poulson explain:

Behind the scenes, the marketing arm of the company has been working with former law enforcement officials and public health officials to monitor and influence vaccine policy. Key to this is a drug industry-funded NGO called Public Good Projects. According to documents we have seen, PGP works closely with social media platforms, government agencies and news websites to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by rapidly identifying and “shutting down misinformation”. A network of 45,000 healthcare professionals are given talking points “and advice on how to respond when vaccine misinformation goes mainstream”, according to an email from Moderna.

Moderna’s disinformation arm is perpetuating the public discourse wars that have been raging since early in the pandemic, aimed at shutting down anything that might undermine Covid-19-related policies, including lockdowns and efforts to encourage mass vaccinations. These documents provide a new window into the process that has roiled speech debates over the last three years.

With PGP, Moderna is monitoring a huge range of mainstream outlets, as well as unconventional ones, such as the Steam online gaming community and Medium. Meanwhile, Moderna also retains Talkwalker which uses its “Blue Silk” artificial intelligence to monitor vaccine-related conversations across 150 million websites in nearly 200 countries. Discussions around “competitor” issues, including discussions of Pfizer are flagged as well as vaccine hesitancy.

The Public Goods Project, which Moderna funds, draws its employees from government law enforcement and intelligence agencies in a revolving door characteristic of the censorship-industrial complex:

Their monitoring team includes Moderna’s global intelligence division, which is run by Nikki Rutman, who spent nearly 20 years as an analyst with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Rutman was working from the FBI’s Boston office during the COVID-19 effort known as “Operation Warp Speed”, which involved the FBI conducting weekly cybersecurity meetings with the Boston headquartered Moderna. She is among many former law enforcement agents now with the vaccine maker. The involvement of former law enforcement reflects a wider trend in the misinformation-space, as the Department of Homeland Security and FBI have increasingly leaned on social media platforms to shape content decisions as a national security issue.

PGD’s reports flagged as “high risk”, among others, CEO Elon Musk, comedian Russell Brand, former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson, Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger, former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and tennis legend Novak Djokovic. Even my co-plaintiff in Missouri v. Biden, Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, was targeted by Moderna. Fang and Poulson note:

None of the reports that we have seen makes any attempt to dispute the claims made. Rather the claims are automatically deemed “misinformation” if they encourage vaccine hesitancy. We approached Moderna for comment, but they didn’t respond.

“What often flies under the banner of combating disinformation is, in this case, nothing but corporate public relations, trying to spin public narratives in directions favorable to the corporation’s interests,” said Aaron Kheriaty, a bioethicist, and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Does anyone really want to live under a regime where their social media feed is essentially curated by government or by multinational corporate interests that stand to profit, influencing opinion on these issues?”

This is where the line between PR and lobbying gets blurred for Moderna. It’s all very well for a company to be information gathering, and attempting to send out a positive message. But it’s quite another for it to be using that information for more problematic purposes. Of particular interest in this respect is PGP — the company at the heart of Moderna’s misinformation department.

The Public Goods Project, like the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project, pressures social media companies to censor disfavored content and artificially boost favored content that otherwise would not go viral organically. Whereas EIP/Virality did this for the federal government, in clear violation of the Constitution as we argue in Missouri v. Biden, PGP is doing this on behalf of private corporate interests. Recall, however, that the distinction between private and public breaks down with companies like Moderna. As I explained in The New Abnormal, Moderna splits profits for its covid shot with the NAIAD, the division of the NIH formerly run by Anthony Fauci, which conducted initial research on the mRNA shot. So here, the financial interests of Moderna and the federal government align perfectly.

Likewise, Moderna’s attack-dog PGP maintains close ties between government, industry, and media blurring the lines between private action and state action when it comes to their censorship and propaganda efforts, as Fang and Poulson report:

Financed through a $1,275,000 donation from the Biotechnology and Innovation Organization, lobbyists representing Pfizer and Moderna, PGP maintains close ties to government and media. Moderna first worked closely with PGP on a programme called “Stronger” in 2021-22 in which it identified misinformation and shaped content decisions on social media. PGP was particularly well-equipped to help with this since it had backdoor access to Twitter data, known as the “firehose”, and helped Twitter formulate its pandemic-related speech policies.

We have discovered, through internal emails from Twitter, that PGP’s misinformation reporting team was frequently in contact with Todd O’Boyle, a lobbyist at Twitter, and sent him periodic Excel sheets with accounts to amplify or censor. Their intention, as we have gleaned from the emails exchanged, was not only to combat misinformation, but also to affect the content and tenor of public debate. While PGP identified some obvious falsehoods, such as claims that the vaccines contained microchips or were devised intentionally to kill patients, many tweets flagged as misinformation were simply critical of vaccine passports and other policies designed to coerce vaccination.

The relationship may have extended into the law enforcement space. Last year, Vijaya Gadde, then serving as Twitter’s general counsel, advised the Department of Homeland Security’s task force on combating misinformation on trusted fact-checking organisations. In an email to her colleagues, reported here for the first time, Gadde recommended that the government meet with PGP to decipher Covid-19 speech issues.

PGP does not limit itself to shaping public discourse around vaccines, but pushes into the public policy space to censor content related to vaccine mandates and other pandemic policies:

As the pandemic abates, Moderna is, if anything, ratcheting up its surveillance operation, with a keen interest in anything relating to policies designed to coerce vaccination. In particular, the company is closely tracking elected officials and recently passed laws in Arkansas and Texas which restricted vaccine mandates.

“Politicians attempting to ban COVID-19 mandates — or at least claiming to — signals growing resistance to COVID-19 mitigations,” reads one of the Moderna alerts. Given the company avoided publicly commenting on the mandate debate, this is revelatory.

PGD is not alone, but is merely one among many new players in the censorship-industrial complex. As resistance to social media censorship grows, those who profit from censorship are doubling-down on these efforts, and finding new entities happy to do this dirty work for a handsome fee:

But despite the growing backlash against social media censorship, the network of fact-checking nonprofits has grown at an industrial pace, providing opaque opportunities for private and public interests to take subtle control over the public discourse. Such sophistication in blending public-health messaging and corporate advertising should concern anyone with an interest in how government controls free speech.

“This is an interesting peek behind the disinformation industry, what it actually does,” said Kheriaty, the bioethicist. ”It’s about controlling a narrative, controlling the flow of information, controlling how people think about public policy, like the vaccine mandate, and how people think about a particular product that a corporation is profiting from,” he added. “It’s deeply disturbing.”

Much of this corporate-government censorship and covert propaganda are now being outsourced to AI, as I will explain in a future post. Can a machine violate the Constitution? No, but certainly those who deploy machines for this purpose are legally responsible for the results.

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