A remarkable court filing reveals behind-the-scenes negotiations with Twitter.
A remarkable court filing reveals behind-the-scenes negotiations with Twitter.
L ast summer, 855 days into California’s grueling Covid-19 state of emergency and just weeks shy of the first day of school, Los Angeles County director of public health Barbara Ferrer warned locals that she would impose a countywide mask mandate, beginning July 29.
“With the continued increase in cases, and now as you’re seeing the corresponding increase in hospitalizations . . . we’re really worried,” she told reporters on July 7, 2022.
Twitter began to simmer and, on July 13, reached a rolling boil. That’s when a video leaked of a meeting of besmocked doctors at L.A. County–USC Medical Center. Their diagnosis directly contradicted Ferrer’s dire assessment. Yes, the doctors said, Covid case counts are up. But serious infections? Hospitalizations?
“We’re just seeing nobody with severe Covid disease,” said one of the doctors. “We have no one in the hospital who had pulmonary disease due to Covid — nobody in the hospital,” said another. It went on like that: “Certainly there is no reason, from a hospitalization-due-to-Covid perspective, to be worried at this point,” “we’re seeing a lot of people with mild disease in urgent care or [in the emergency department] who go home and do not get admitted,” and “a lot of people have bad colds is what we’re seeing.”
And then Ferrer did what California regulators did so often in the Age of Covid. She attempted to silence her critics — in this instance, by leveraging her relationship with Representative Adam Schiff (D.) in an effort to bully Twitter into compliance.
Schiff’s role, part of Ferrer’s broader campaign to suppress critics, is described in a remarkable July 26, 2023, court filing by attorney Julie Hamill of the Alliance of Los Angeles County Parents. The alliance (“representing the interests of Los Angeles County children subjected to harmful and restrictive mandates by local education agencies”) is suing the Department of Public Health and others, including Ferrer herself, for First Amendment violations. A trial is set for October 16.
Ferrer’s communications director Brett Morrow appears to have taken the lead on his boss’s problem with Twitter. He “emailed Twitter’s then-Director of U.S. Public Policy, Lauren Culbertson, for assistance dealing with ‘harassment’ from ‘anti-maskers’ as the County was ‘likely going to bring back indoor masking,’” Hamill writes.
Significantly, Morrow underscored for Culbertson his close connection to Schiff, writing, “I was referred to you by my friend Patrick Boland, who I used to work with in Congressman Schiff’s office.’” Hamill notes that Morrow included “Boland’s name in capital letters in the subject line of the email and copied Mr. Boland on the email.”
Copying Schiff’s top staffer on emails was meant to intimidate Twitter, Hamill says. “At the time of the Twitter Exchange, Mr. Schiff was Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), and Mr. Boland was employed as Chief of Staff to Mr. Schiff and as a Staff Member with HPSCI,” Hamill writes.
“The HPSCI has oversight and investigative authority over social media companies, including Twitter, and had conducted investigations and hearings relating to content moderation on social media,” Hamill continues. “Prior to the Twitter exchange, Congressman Schiff and the HPSCI had publicly discussed amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides immunity to social media companies for content posted by their users. Further, prior to the Twitter exchange, Congressman Schiff sent letters to social media companies demanding information about content moderation policies (a polite term for ‘censorship’).”
Hamill summarizes Morrow’s threat this way: “Twitter was under the regulatory thumb of Schiff and HPSCI.”
Morrow’s opening email “led to an exchange of at least 15 messages between Morrow and Twitter.” On July 26, 2022, for instance, he emailed Twitter’s Culbertson to protest “misinformation going around LA County and upcoming mask requirements.” As evidence of “misinformation,” Morrow said Ferrer’s critics were saying that “Dr. Barbara Ferrer is a fake doctor, LA County is lying about hospitalization numbers, CDC is not recommending masks,” and that “masks are not effective for adults or children.”
Ironically, each of those statements is arguably true. Morrow’s claims are, in other words, textbook misinformation.
It’s technically true, as Morrow implies, that Ferrer is a doctor — if by “doctor” one means that she earned a Ph.D. in social welfare. She does not have a medical degree. Similarly, criticism of her hospitalization numbers came from such respectable sources as those L.A. County–USC doctors. Morrow’s claim about CDC mask recommendations? That depends on which day you asked the CDC. In February 2020, then–surgeon general Jerome Adams declared that masks were useless. Two months later, the CDC abruptly reversed course, declaring that everybody — even two-year-olds — should be masked. Dr. Anthony Fauci later explained that Adams’s original guidance was a noble lie aimed at saving medical masks for front-line health workers. The debate continues. Last week, an Oxford University team led by epidemiologist Tom Jefferson concluded that masks aren’t helpful. “There is just no evidence that they make any difference — full stop,” Jefferson told a reporter.
That day, Hamill filed her group’s lawsuit. Within 48 hours, Ferrer backed off her mask mandate, citing new data — “new data” that were available weeks before.
Ferrer was unrepentant even in defeat. On “July 30, 2022, defendants disabled public comment on the [county’s] social media accounts,” Hamill notes. Given that “County Board of Supervisors meetings were still closed to the public . . . the closure of public comments on the [county’s] social media accounts eliminated the only accessible public square for discussion of public health mandates.”
On August 5, 2022, Hamill writes, a member of her Alliance of Los Angeles County Parents “responded by creating a Twitter account called @ALT_lacph.” The new account would retweet Ferrer’s official Twitter communications but with this crucial difference: Unlike Ferrer’s official account, @ALT would “allow public discussion and debate.”
“On that same day,” Hamill writes, “Morrow sent [Twitter officials] a link to the Alt account Twitter page and asked, ‘Can this be shut down?’ Following an exchange of at least seven emails between Morrow and Twitter regarding the Alt Account,” Twitter permanently suspended the account on August 23, 2022. That appears to have been Ferrer’s only clear win in her battle over Twitter.
Twitter wasn’t Ferrer’s only target. On July 22, 2022, newspapers in the sprawling Southern California News Group (SCNG), including the Los Angeles Daily News and Orange County Register, published a commentary by four medical experts affiliated with the University of Southern California titled “Bringing Back a Mask Mandate in Los Angeles County Is Unjustified.” Within hours of its publication, Morrow asked SCNG opinion editor Sal Rodriguez to remove it. Rodriguez declined.
Hamill sees Ferrer’s continuing efforts to silence her critics as reason to press forward with her lawsuit.
“Defendants may argue that these arguments are moot now that traditional public fora have reopened,” she writes. But she reminds the court that Ferrer has demonstrated her readiness to wield government power “to censor protected speech critical of [her] mandates” by leveraging “congressional connections, media relationships, Twitter executives, and private digital platforms.” What’s to stop Ferrer — or others — from doing so again?
Second, Hamill says Ferrer’s actions “harmed untold numbers of Angelenos by prolonging an illusion of consensus about a pandemic that was not nearly as dire as defendants wanted the public to believe.” “As a result,” she adds, “people remained frightened and treated fellow citizens with suspicion and disdain, children remained masked longer, and children suffered physical, psychological and emotional harm.”
That harm must be mitigated, but Hamill’s group isn’t looking for money. They simply want the court to prevent Ferrer “from engaging in further violations of the constitutionally protected right to speak and receive information.”
Whatever the outcome when Hamill’s case goes to trial in L.A. superior court in October, we can celebrate today. A talented attorney stepped up to defend a constitutional right. Doctors dared to contradict media hype and political theater. A newspaper editor resisted the authoritarian impulse that runs through our political culture. Thousands of parents acted swiftly to protect their children from teachers’-union leaders determined to treat those children as means to political ends. Reason and right have already prevailed.