Morning Wire - Musk vs. Twitter & CA vs. Doctor ‘Disinformation’ | 08.31.22

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Elon Musk opens a new front in his legal battle with Twitter, California moves to punish doctors for “Covid disinformation,” and GOP senators demand details on the FBI’s communication with Facebook. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With his trial date quickly approaching, Elon Musk files a new notice to terminate his deal with Twitter, citing recent whistleblower claims about the company's security. What is Musk alleging, and will it help him get out of the $44 billion deal? I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Wednesday, August 31st, and this is Morning Wire. Doctors in California may soon risk losing their medical license if they spread what the state deems medical disinformation. I think it's going to change the landscape of medicine in California. We may, in fact, worsen our existing physician shortage as a result of it.

What constitutes disinformation and who decides under this new policy? And in response to Mark Zuckerberg's head-turning claims about the FBI's influence on Facebook's suppression of a story damaging to Joe Biden, Republican senators press the tech giant for details. Thanks for waking up with Morningwire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. Do you like to be the first to know about trendy news and current events? If so, you've got to get the Daily Wire Plus app. Not only will you receive mobile notifications whenever something's happening,

but you'll also have access to the best commentary to break it all down. Download the Daily Wire Plus app and keep up with the facts no matter where your day takes you. Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, has filed a second notice to terminate his agreement to buy Twitter. He's citing a report from a whistleblower who says the platform has serious security issues that Twitter's leadership knew about but failed to address. Daily Wire Culture reporter Megan Basham is here now to explain the new grounds Musk is citing to walk away from the Twitter deal and what legal experts are saying about it. So Megan, last week we covered Twitter whistleblower Peter Zatko, who was the company's chief of security for two years. What specifically is Musk drawing on from Zacko's complaint?

So Zatko said in a report he submitted to Congress that Twitter suffers from what he called extreme egregious deficiencies in the areas of security and content moderation. He said lower-level staffers are able to access sensitive user data. He claimed that the company knowingly hired intelligence agents at the behest of foreign governments, and he said those agents also had access to user data. Finally, he said Twitter hasn't taken steps to stop Russia and China from using the platform to engage in disinformation campaigns. And he alleges that the company's

leadership knew about all of these issues and refused to act on them. He claims that they deliberately misled the company's board and federal regulators about all of this. And then on a separate but related topic, Zacko said that Twitter execs intentionally misled Elon Musk about the number of bots on the site. Now, that's interesting because the prevalence of bot accounts was the original basis for the notice that Musk filed to end the Twitter deal. And while he's probably pretty happy, for PR purposes to have this whistleblower back him up, it's not actually the basis of this second filing. The security issues are.

So here's Tulane Law Professor Ann Lipton explaining to CNBC how different this approach is. Originally, his basis for termination was about thoughts and spam, and these are just completely different, and presumably would require an entirely different discovery process and a completely different shape of the case. But Musk's legal team says that because Twitter withheld these problems from Musk, that gives him grounds to terminate the acquisition.

So will this be a major pillar of Musk's litigation strategy in October when he goes to trial with Twitter? So Musk's lawyer said in a letter to the SEC that a second termination notice isn't necessary to end the deal, but they said they wanted to file it in case the original filing is, quoting here, determined to be invalid for any reason. Musk's team said that if Zacko's allegations are true, they demonstrate that Twitter has breached key provisions of the merger agreement. And on those grounds, they argue that this gives Musk additional reasons to terminate the deal. So how is Twitter responding to this latest move?

Well, Twitter is now fighting a battle on two fronts here. So a Twitter spokesman put out a statement on Tuesday saying that Musk's latest termination effort is invalid and wrongful under the acquisition agreement. And they insist that Zach goes allegations, and again, I'm going to quote, are really, riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lack important context. So the upshot here is that they intend to enforce the deal that they made to sell Twitter to Musk for the original price. And if you forgot, that's a cool $44 billion. Still a lot of money.

Yeah. Another chapter in the saga as we keep waiting for this trial in October. Thanks, Megan. Anytime. That was Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham. Coming up, a new California law that would punish doctors for spreading disinformation heads to the governor's desk. If you like this podcast, subscribe to our Morning Wire newsletter available exclusively to DailyWire members.

Get the Morning Wire newsletter delivered straight to your inbox when you join at DailyWire.com slash subscribe. Use code MorningWire to try Reader's Pass membership and get your first month for only 99 cents. This week, California's State Senate passed a new law combating the state. spread of COVID misinformation. If signed, the law would make California the first state to threaten punishment for doctors who spread what the state deems inaccurate information on vaccines and COVID prevention. Here with the latest on the ramifications in the medical community and how doctors are responding is Daily Wire Senior Editor Cabot Phillips. So Cabot first, tell us about this new measure. So on Monday, the California legislature approved AB 2098, a law that if signed by Governor Gavin

Newsom will punish doctors who spread what the state deems, quote, COVID disinformation. According to the state, COVID disinformation is anything, quote, that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus. Under the measure, the Medical Board of California would have the power to suspend or even revoke the license of any doctor they deem guilty of spreading such disinformation. Now, how are doctors responding to this? Well, it's a mixed back. So the American Medical Association, for example, has been calling for legislation like this for a while now. They say that doctors should face consequences when they share information on COVID that contradicts the general medical consensus. They say that laws like this will save lives. For example, Richard Pan is a doctor

and the bill's co-sponsor in the state senate. He said, quote, in order for a patient to give informed consent, they have to be well informed. But there are plenty of doctors who fear the law could have a chilling effect on free speech and scientific debate for that matter. On that front, I talked to Dr. Human Hamadi. He's a biomedical research scientist in California with extensive experience at MIT and Harvard Medical School. The entirety of medical science and the advancement of patient care is dependent on a continuous critical questioning

and reexamination of everything that we know to be true. This is why scientific papers, once are submitted to a journal, aren't automatically published. They're subject to intensive peer review where you have two, three, five, sometimes even more people who are experts in that field who don't have an interest in your work, critically reviewing every word of that manuscript, right, and finding any reason they can to poke holes into it only to force you to strengthen what's published. This goes in the exact opposite direction.

It says that not only is criticism not permitted, but facts are now determined by politicians and bureaucrats. Dr. Maddie also said the law could impact the way that some doctors in state communicate with their patients for fear of contradicting the medical consensus on COVID and vaccines. I hear people scared out of their pants regarding the likelihood of passage of this and the ramifications it would have not only regarding COVID, but eventually in terms of other aspects of medical practice, physicians are telling me I'm going to have to move out of California.

I'm going to have to restrict the way I practice medicine. If I want to stay here, I'm basically going to be silenced. It's frightening. Dr. Hamadhi also said this could lead some doctors. to leave the state, which would be devastating, given the fact that 44% of Californians already live in an area deemed to be experiencing a doctor shortage. So I think the important question here is what exactly counts as COVID misinformation?

Yeah, that's definitely one of the main concerns here, because according to California, it's anything that contradicts scientific consensus. Now, critics of the measure have pointed out that the scientific community often shifts on certain topics and that things once considered COVID misinformation are now widely accepted as fact. For example, a year ago, if a doctor had publicly stated that natural immunity to COVID is more effective than a vaccine, they'd be contradicting CDC guidance. And under this law, could be at risk of losing their medical license.

But now we know that's true. So it remains to be seen how the law will handle the fact that the science is often very much not settled on many issues related to COVID. Now, have any other states tried something like this? Yeah, we've seen some other examples. but in the other direction. So 14 states, including Florida, Tennessee and Indiana, have passed laws restricting the ability of state medical boards

to strip doctors of their license if they're accused of spreading non-mainstream advice or offering patients off-label treatment for COVID. So what California is doing here is really unprecedented. And now the question becomes whether we start seeing legal challenges from doctors who potentially lose their license. Right. Well, and COVID is not the only area where we're seeing fierce debate in the medical community.

So lots of ramifications for this. Cabot, thanks for reporting. Anytime. That's Daily Wire senior editor, Cabot Phillips. Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson sent a letter to Facebook this week requesting whatever correspondence the company had with the FBI in the run-up to the 2020 election

regarding potential Russian disinformation. The request comes in the wake of an interview that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave to podcaster Joe Rogan in which he confirmed that federal authorities had warned Facebook about potential foreign interference, and that warning played a role in the platform censoring the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story. Here to discuss the fallout as columnist David Marcus.

So, David, what are Grassley and Johnson looking for? Morning. They want to know the exact nature of this warning that the FBI gave Facebook. The feds say they never mentioned the laptop, but Zuckerberg, when discussing the decision to bury the story, clearly said this FBI warning played a role. And let's not have to be a role.

forget that in the day or two after the laptop story dropped, a story everyone now agrees is accurate, there were former federal officials signing letters calling the story Russian disinformation, the very thing that the FBI had raised the alarm about. Now, this isn't Grassley's first concern about the FBI's handling of the laptop controversy. He's previously asked for information about an agent named Timothy Tebow, who resigned this week. Grassley says Tebow has been accused by a whistleblower of hampering the investigation into the president's son. Are these requests related? Absolutely they are.

What Grassley wants to know here is whether the FBI was acting on legitimate concerns about foreign interference or if they were trying to sway the election for Biden. And, you know, it's interesting because the Mueller report did not find Russian collusion with Trump, but it did find a lot of interference and operations on social media platforms by Russia and other bad actors. Some of this was in support of leftist causes, like Black Lives Matter. So it'll be interesting to see if those threats show up in the communication as well, or if it was only these Trump-related threats.

Facebook isn't the only tech giant facing these kinds of questions. Twitter recently lost a lawsuit to journalist Alex Berenson, who was a critic of lockdowns and vaccines amid the pandemic. Berenzen has documents that show that the White House actually pressured Twitter to ban him from the platform, which they eventually did. is this also related? Yeah, it's similar in a lot of ways. Once again, you have the federal government

telling a social media company, hey, misinformation can be really dangerous. It can harm our response to COVID, so please police for it. And by the way, be especially wary of conservatives like Berenson. The problem is that it's now obvious that Berenson got a lot right,

not everything maybe, but on both lockdowns and vaccines, it's clear that criticism once viewed as quackery should have been a part of the conversation. You mentioned the Mueller report and the fact that there are real foreign information operations targeting the U.S., including its elections. Has the politicization of this issue hampered efforts to combat these attacks from countries like Russia, Iran, North Korea, and increasingly China? It sure seems that way. When the Department of Homeland Security launched its woe-begotten disinformation board earlier this year,

it was really framed in terms of limiting the American user as opposed to stopping the foreign enemy. And the woman chosen to run it had a deeply, deeply partisan view of the issue. That's why it crashed and burned and is now shelved for good. But look, this is a real issue. And we aren't doing a great job at dealing with it. Instead, we're pointing fingers at other Americans. What do we expect the upshot will be if Grassley and Johnson are able to secure these documents? Could we be looking into a broader investigation?

If the GOP takes the House or Senate in the midterm, I think there's a very strong chance of such investigations, not just to get to the bottom of what happened, but towards potential legislation that could address what most Republicans view as very blatant political bias in social media content moderation. So this issue isn't going anywhere. No, it's not. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me. That was Daily Wire contributor, David Marcus. Other stories we're tracking this week. Attorney General Merrick Garland has announced.

announced new bans for Justice Department officials on political involvement. The move comes as the agency faces accusation of political bias. And Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president who took down the Iron Curtain, died Tuesday at the age of 91. Thanks for listening to Morning Wire. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation. If you love our show and you stand with our mission, please consider subscribing, leaving us a five-star rating,

and most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know.