If we have any honest historians out there, a true chronicling of 2020 to 2023 is going to make the hairs on your neck stand on end.

Matt Taibbi has just released another installment of the so-called "Twitter Files," and this one looks closely at something called the Virality Project (VP), based at evil Stanford University.

On the eve of Taibbi's congressional testimony we had started hearing about what it had been up to, but we now know a lot more.

VP worked with the major Big Tech platforms to suppress dissident voices even when by VP's own admission, what those voices were saying was true. It worked with the Office of the Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control as well.

Writes Taibbi:

This story is important for two reasons. One, as Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success. Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.

Two, it accelerated the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.

Through July of 2020, Twitter’s internal guidance on Covid-19 required a story be “demonstrably false” or contain an “assertion of fact” to be actioned. But the Virality Project, in partnership with the CDC, pushed different standards.

VP told Twitter that “true stories that could fuel hesitancy,” including things like “celebrity deaths after vaccine” or the closure of a central NY school due to reports of post-vaccine illness, should be considered "Standard Vaccine Misinformation on Your Platform."

Raising objections to vaccine passport programs also attracted the attention of VP, which advised, "We expect the vaccine passport debate to continue as a key talking point especially bridging the anti-vax community with the right-wing media sphere."

Therefore, "concerns" over such programs could be considered a "misinformation" event.

When the AstraZeneca vaccine began to be banned in Europe because people experienced blood clots, VP grew concerned that "increased doubts in one manufacturer's vaccine may lead to hesitancy about vaccination overall." Therefore, VP would "continue to monitor discussions about these suspensions."

By March of 2021, writes Taibbi, Twitter personnel "were aping VP language, describing 'campaigns against vaccine passports,' 'fear of mandatory immunizations,' and 'misuse of official reporting tools' as 'potential violations.'"

VP urged platforms to "hone in" on an "increasingly popular narrative about natural immunity."

VP falsely described "breakthrough infections" as "extremely rare events" and should of course never be cited to claim that "vaccines are ineffective." VP also claimed it was misinformation to say that the shots did not prevent transmission, even though it is a commonplace that they do not.

Even as research continued to vindicate natural immunity, this didn't matter because according to VP, "Whether or not...scientific consensus is changing, 'natural immunity' is a key narrative…among anti-vaccine activists."

In April of last year, VP sought a "rumor-control mechanism to address nationally trending narratives," and -- see if this sounds familiar -- a "Misinformation and Disinformation Center of Excellence" at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

It certainly should sound familiar, because the very next day the director of DHS announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board.

The truth is coming out, dear friends.

We need someone to write The Secret History of the 21st Century. (I am too burned out to do it, but some young whippersnapper should make a name for himself by doing it.)

Email via tom woods