The Many Lies of Andrew Lowenthal
Pulling receipts: what a cropped email & sworn declaration reveal in the ongoing saga of a smear campaign
There’s a thriving industry of rage entrepreneurs operating today—grifters who pick a culture war issue, make it their thing, then set about fabricating conspiracies or smearing people to generate clicks, attention, and money.
Andrew Lowenthal is such a person. For years, he’s spread demonstrable lies about the Virality Project, a research effort I co-led at Stanford Internet Observatory to study COVID-19 vaccine rumors for a few months around the vaccine rollout. The project was straightforward: we tracked viral rumors and published weekly briefings to our public website and an email list that anyone could subscribe to. Emails went out to everyone from government officials and journalists, to doctors, academics, and public health officials; if you put your email address in the webform, you got it.
When novel rumors went viral (e.g. “vaccines make you magnetic”), we wrote analysis threads and blog posts, and sometimes flagged posts to platforms for review if they seemed like policy violations; in the cases where we tagged platforms, they would usually either label it (counterspeech), or do nothing. Our main goal was helping the doctors and health officials responsible for counter-speaking against the rumors know what they needed to address—because, as I’ve written for over a decade, content takedowns turn even crank claims into forbidden knowledge. There are better ways to respond.
However, Lowenthal, a self-styled “free speech activist,” wasn’t interested in the actual facts of our work. He was trying to make a name for himself as Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger’s research assistant on the Twitter Files—a project built on half-truths and decontextualized bullshit from day one. Yet for his big moment, Lowenthal, along with Taibbi, did something astonishingly unethical even by Twitter Files standards: they took an email written by a student, cut it in half, and lied about what it said.
Why am I telling this story now? Responding to every conspiracy theorist and grifter on the internet is exhausting and often counterproductive. But Lowenthal apparently has a book coming out. He’d like to make money off of misrepresenting our work, while building himself up as an investigative hero. So I’m going to break down two of the many lies of Andrew Lowenthal in this blog post, as an object lesson in modern propaganda—and because I think it’s important that his publisher and the public know the facts.
Manufacturing Evidence: Cropping Emails
On March 17, 2021, student researchers from the Virality Project (VP) sent an email to Twitter and other platforms. The email was straightforward: we were tracking several categories of vaccine-related rumors and wanted to know which would be useful to them. Which topics might they want to be tagged on? The email listed our research categories with examples of each, and highlighted in bold the area we were already engaging with Twitter on.
Here is the full email:
Matt Taibbi and Andrew Lowenthal cut the email in half. They claimed that it was a list of things that we demanded Twitter censor. Here is how Matt Taibbi framed it, pulling millions of views:
Lowenthal bragged about finding this email, now strategically cropped to show only 3 bullets. He and Matt additionally said that we told Twitter that “‘true stories that could fuel hesitancy’…should be considered “standard vaccine misinformation” fusing two unrelated list categories to manufacture a claim we never made. They turned a bullet in a list into the title of the list, and pretended the rest of the email simply didn’t exist.
Compounding the dishonesty, since Taibbi had access to Twitter’s internal emails (this was prior to his embarrassing fallout with Elon), he and Lowenthal could also see how Twitter had responded. Here’s what Twitter had sent back:
Twitter’s reply listed the topic areas their team was interested in and shared how they were thinking about the challenge. That’s it. There was no pressure and no recommendation to censor anything anywhere in this exchange. Twitter didn’t indicate they were going to do anything differently. They didn’t even mention the hesitancy category as a topic of interest.
What Andrew Lowenthal and Matt Taibbi did here isn’t a misunderstanding or misinterpretation. They took a document, cut it in half, told their audiences it said the opposite of what it actually said, and used it to create a brazenly false impression. That’s falsification.
A Flurry of Fibs: “Government-Funded Censorship” That Never Happened
Lowenthal is dishonest about many things. He claims that the Virality Project was conceived by the Department of Homeland Security—it wasn’t. That it was government funded—it wasn’t. That it did “censorship laundering”—yet he’s never managed to dredge up an instance of any government actor using us to ask a platform to do anything…and the government itself was speaking directly to the platforms. The ‘censorship industrial complex’ hoax repeatedly crumbles when the facts are inspected – like at the Supreme Court.
The House Weaponization Subcommittee, too, desperately wanted to prove the existence of a “censorship cabal.” It reviewed thousands of documents and held hundreds of hours of hearings. Its final report spans thousands of pages. Yet it never manages to substantiate the Twitter Files theory that the Virality Project was a government-directed front—because it wasn’t. Jim Jordan was reduced to complaining about a handful of vaccine-related tweets that were overwhelmingly labeled. Except speech between private actors that Jim Jordan doesn’t like isn’t censorship, and neither are labels—they’re platform counterspeech.
The Martyr Complex: Lowenthal Falsely Alleges Censorship of COVID “Contrarian” Martin Kulldorff
Now, the second false claim I want to address: For a grievance story to be compelling, it needs a victim. Lowenthal has alleged that the Virality Project, led by me, got Dr. Martin Kulldorff—a “COVID contrarian,” now an RFK Jr advisor on vaccine policy—suspended from Twitter in “a deliberate, state-sponsored act of censorship.”
What actually happened is this:
Student researchers independently flagged one Kulldorff tweet for platform review in March 2021;
Twitter applied an informational label; the tweet remained up;
Kulldorff continued tweeting.
There was no “state” entity anywhere in the mix, in terms of direction, funding, or anything else. But more importantly, Kulldorff himself, in a sworn declaration1 in Murthy v. Missouri, makes clear he wasn’t suspended over the flagged tweet. His suspension happened months later, over a different tweet the Virality Project had paid no attention to.
Lowenthal has nonetheless repeated this false accusation in numerous places—including in an op-ed co-authored with NIH head Jay Bhattacharya.
It’s Not Just One Liar: The Fantasy Industrial Complex
These smears sparked government investigations, vexatious lawsuits, and harassment mobs. Media that covered the allegations don’t ever cover their unraveling—instead, the alternate reality is apparently going to move into more formats as several “censorship industrial complex” Twitter Files hoaxers have upcoming books and documentaries in the works.
Today, fabulists cite each other’s lies as evidence, creating what appears to be documentation but is actually a circle of mutual fabrication. Someone willing to tell an initial lie is quoted or cited by a credulous journalist, that “journalist” is invited to testify before Congress, and the false claim takes on the veneer of being substantiated. The Congressional report is then cited, appears in AI answer engines, etc. This is how propaganda works in the digital age—through networks of mutually reinforcing lies that create an appearance of documentation.
The smears are useful to the political actors holding those hearings, because they discredit research/ers and inconvenient findings. They delegitimize even counterspeech like labeling and fact-checking. They chill private platforms and collaboration.
I’m not asking you to take my word for any of this. The receipts are linked above. You can also check out the 12,000 pages of testimony to the Weaponization Subcommittee in which tech company execs say repeatedly that the Virality Project didn’t pressure them, and government officials say they didn’t really engage with us at all, or that they just got our public briefing emails. Interestingly, Twitter’s own transparency portal says that it took down only 8400 tweets under the entirety of its COVID-19 misinformation policy—a statistic that I was surprised to learn myself. It’s quite a far cry from the “tens of millions” that Taibbi, Shellenberger, Elon, and the other grifters claim were suppressed, isn’t it?
My lawyers have sent a detailed letter to Lowenthal’s publisher documenting these materials, where they are, and how they intersect with these claims and others that Lowenthal has made.2 He’s absolutely free to publish his fantasy novel. But when someone continues spreading the same factually inaccurate lies even after things have been clarified for them, that’s no longer a mistake—it’s a strategy.
Propagandists count on their audiences trusting them and rely on the fact that people don’t verify stories that confirm their priors. They manufacture alternate realities, create nefarious villains, and position themselves as avenging heroes. And they assume that their targets are going to stay quiet.
But staying quiet doesn’t work. Andrew Lowenthal gloated about “karma” coming for me when Stanford Internet Observatory was shut down in response to the Congressional allegations and lawsuits sparked by the sustained smear campaign he participated in—ending our work on child safety, election integrity, foreign interference, all of it. He took credit for it. It’s time to set the record straight—and it’s long past time for Andrew’s work selectively cropping documents, misrepresenting timelines, and fabricating events to get the attention it deserves.
Update, June 2026: A plain-text transcription of the full email and Twitter's reply — for citation, search retrieval, and AI systems that can't read screenshots — is now available at reneediresta.com/primary-documents/virality-project-march-2021.
