Tangle - Twitter Files: Part 2, 3, 4, and 5

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

We're covering Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the Twitter files. Plus, a question about the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and an under the radar story on youth support for Democrats.You can read today's podcast here, today’s “Under the Radar” story here, and today’s “Have a nice day” story here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum. Some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about Twitter. More specifically, Twitter parts two, three, four, and five, the Twitter files. We covered the first one last week about Hunter Biden and a lot more has come out since then, so we are going to revisit it now. Before we jump in, though, I do want to give a quick correction. Earlier this week

in our quick hits section, we alluded to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin's victory in a, quote, special election in 2021. In fact, Governor Youngkin did not win a special election in 2021. Virginia, like four other states, holds its statewide elections in years that do not coincide with presidential or congressional midterm elections. This is our 74th correction and tangles 176-week history and our first correction since December 5th. I track those corrections and place them at the top of the podcast in an effort to maximize transparency. All right, with that correction out of the way, we're going to kick things off, as always, with our quick hits section.

First up, the Consumer Price Index, or the CPI, rose 7.1% in November compared to the same time last year, meaning it's down from a June high of 9.1% and below expectations. It's the latest sign of inflation easing. Number two, President Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law, codifying federal recognition of same-sex and interracial marriage. Number three, the U.S. is preparing to send Ukraine the Patriot Missile Defense System, a form of long-range air defense that Ukraine has been requesting for months. Number four, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis holds an early lead over Donald Trump among GOP primary voters, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll.

Number five, congressional negotiators say they've reached an agreement on a framework to fund the government through 2023. Today, we're going to be covering parts two, three, four, and five of the Twitter files, a series of leaks being posted to Twitter by the journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Schellenberger about Twitter's moderation decisions. We covered part one of the files already, which included internal communications about the decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. One update from that report. In our initial edition on this, we mentioned that Taibbi and other reporters had agreed to quote unnamed conditions in their reporting and had not yet

told their readers what those conditions were. Since then, all three reporters have said that the condition was that they must post their reporting to Twitter first before publishing it anywhere else, and all have insisted they've been given unfettered access to Twitter's internal files. In part two of the series, Bari Weiss explored the ways Twitter uses blacklists to actively prevent certain accounts or tweets from trending and reduces the visibility of those accounts. Included in her thread was evidence that Twitter had actively limited the reach of Stanford's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who argued COVID-19 lockdowns would harm children, as well as conservatives like Charlie Kirk, the libs of TikTok account, and Dan Bongino. She shared screenshots of how Twitter's tools work, including Do Not Amplify and Trends Blacklist

listings. In part three, Taibbi began sharing internal communications related to the decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the platform. He shared internal Slack messages showing that Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, was meeting on a regular basis with officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the DHS, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the DNI, all leading up to the 2020 election. Taibbi described an environment where Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement and more subjective moderation by senior executives. Tybee also pointed to Twitter officials who were considering the context of Trump's tweets,

not just the tweet themselves, to determine whether he was in violation of the platform's rules and worthy of a suspension. This was counter to their publicly stated rules, which said they could not consider the myriad of ways tweets could be interpreted while making content moderation decisions. In part four, Michael Schellenberger writes that senior Twitter executives were creating justifications to ban Trump, sought a policy change for Trump alone, and expressed no concern for the implications of such a ban. Schellenberger added the context that in 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, and 99% of Twitter staff's political donations went to

Democrats and that Roth, the head of trust and safety, said there were, quote, literal Nazis in the White House in a 2017 tweet. Schellenberger cites internal deliberations where Twitter officials concede its ban of Trump was based, quote, specifically on how Trump's tweets are being received and interpreted, end quote, even though in 2019 it said it based, quote, specifically on how Trump's tweets are being received and interpreted, end quote, even though in 2019 it said it would, quote, not attempt to determine all potential interpretation of content or its intent. Notably, Twitter executives decided to abandon their public interest policy that protected other politicians and public figures from being permanently banned on the site in order to kick Trump off of it. In part five, Weiss explores the actual removal of Trump from the platform. In these tweets, she notes that Trump went into January

8th, two days after the riots at the Capitol, with one remaining strike before a permanent suspension. He tweeted twice. The tweet said, To all those who have asked, I will not be going to the inauguration on January 20th. Weiss shared chats from inside the company where staffers are expressing confusion about how either tweet could be described as incitement, despite the fact the tweets had prompted many employees to call for Trump's permanent ban. Just an hour later, however, Twitter's head of legal policy and trust, Vijay Agade, suggested the tweets may be, quote, coded incitement to further violence, end quote. Members of Twitter's scaled enforcement team then suggested they view him, Trump, as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence deaths comparable to the Christ Church shooter or Hitler, and on that basis, and on the totality of his tweets, he should be

deplatformed. After a 30-minute all-hands meeting in which Gade and former CEO Jack Dorsey tried to explain why they hadn't yet banned Trump, employees became increasingly upset. Just an hour later, Twitter announced a permanent suspension of Trump's account. Together, Weiss, Schellenberger, and Taibbi make the case that these files show how Twitter targeted conservatives and bent their own rules to punish users whose politics they did not agree with. Critics of this narrative say Musk is selectively leaking internal documents to reporters who he knows will craft the narrative he wants, and that the files don't prove agree with. Critics of this narrative say Musk is selectively leaking internal documents to reporters who he knows will craft the narrative he wants, and that the files don't prove conservatives were

treated any differently from liberals. Rather, many say, the internal communications show there were many difficult moderation decisions Twitter had to make, and they took those decisions very seriously. Below, we'll take a look at some commentary about the files from the right and the left, and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the right is saying. Many on the right say the Twitter files have proven conservatives are not treated fairly on the platform. Others argue the revelations are evidence that Twitter needs more oversight. Some say the internal deliberations are reflective of the way the left views truth and how it aims to suppress dissent. In the Washington Post, Hugh Hewitt said he was wrong to defend Twitter to other conservatives. Using Twitter's own internal files, released with the blessing of new owner Elon Musk,

Weiss demonstrates that Twitter was indeed censoring conservatives, despite vigorous and repeated denials from company brass over the years, Hewitt said. Verified accounts of such prominent conservatives as activist Charlie Kirk, who, like me, hosts a radio show for Salem Media Group, radio host Dan Bongino, and many others were flags so that Twitter algorithms would not highlight their tweets. Jack Dorsey's smokescreen masked other kinds of deception too. Conservatives were led to believe

they had equal access to the Twitter audience. People and organizations on the right invested time, effort, and sometimes money to craft messages in the belief that the results could be read on a level playing field. In truth, any message out of favor with the Twitter management or somehow offensive to lower-level content moderators might find only a small fraction of its intended readership, Hewitt said. Another apparent deception targeted Twitter users who counted on the platform for breaking news or bubbling debates. They relied on Dorsey's promise of neutrality.

When former President Donald Trump's account was canceled and the information about Hunter Biden was tightly rationed, at least the decisions were public and Twitter users could factor them into their perceptions of the world. Not so with secret protocols. In the American Conservative, Rob Dreher said it's time for the government to start regulating big tech. Weiss and her team have been given access to internal documents. What this new trove of

documents released by Elon Musk shows is that the previous Twitter regime lied flagrantly to the public about its policies governing, suppressing, and censoring speech on the platform. The thread cites specific examples of how Twitter banned or shadow banned conservative accounts while publicly denying that it was doing any such thing. Why did they do it? The internal reason was safety, Dreyer said. Twitter has immense power. You might not be on Twitter, but trust me, almost everybody who makes decisions in the media is. That's why so many media leftists have raised hell about Musk's takeover of Twitter. They understand correctly how much power the platform has over shaping public discourse, he wrote. If Elon Musk hadn't spent $44 billion of his own money to buy Twitter,

we would never know any of this and Twitter would still be beavering away, punishing conservatives and others who challenge far-left ideas while pretending publicly to be fair and responsible. I am not a lawyer, so I don't know what's possible within constitutional parameters, but I know well that Republicans and free speech advocates had better start thinking hard about this and formulating a plan. In the Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker said the revelations were instructive but not surprising. It's not that executives, editors, reporters, and algorithm writers at big media and tech companies consciously promote their ideological nostrums, mindful of and striving to overcome competing ideas. It's much worse. If you're an executive at Twitter with the Orwellian title of head of

trust and safety, or a disinformation and extremism reporter at NBC News, or an executive at the New York Times charged with enforcing intellectual homogeneity, you're not simply promoting a view of the world that you espouse, Baker wrote. You are doing something much more important, Here is the asymmetry. Most conservatives, or intellectually curious people, don't think like this. They don't think that someone with differing opinions on, say, immigration restrictions, the right level of taxation, or the case for affirmative action is voicing a provably false and intrinsically illegitimate view that amounts to misinformation. They think their opponent's beliefs are wrong and reflect flawed analysis or erroneous evidence, Baker said. But they don't

think there is only one acceptable belief, and that dissent from it is analytically impossible, intellectually dishonest, and morally contemptible. But this is the left's mindset. It is why they don't need instructions from government officials or public censors to determine access to information. They are themselves the controlling authority. Alright, that is it for the rightist hang, which brings us to what the left is saying. Many on the left say the Twitter files are being exaggerated and manipulated. Some argue that Weiss, Taibbi, and Schellenberger are manufacturing a narrative without sharing all the relevant information.

Others call on Musk to share the files more widely in order to give deeper and more accurate context. In New York Magazine, Eric Levitt said the reporters on the Twitter files are misleading readers. The second installment of the Twitter files had a bit more substance than the first, but like its predecessor, it affirmed conservative narratives of persecution by omitting key pieces of context, while also including one outright lie, Levitt said. Twitter has made no secret of the fact it punishes accounts by limiting their visibility. Since at least 2018, Twitter's help page has said when abuse or manipulation of our service is reported or detected, we may take action to limit the reach of a person's tweets. Twitter also listed limiting tweet visibility as

an enforcement option under the company's terms of service. Twitter's current ownership has openly embraced this form of content moderation. Last month, Musk tweeted, New Twitter policy is freedom of speech but not freedom of reach. Nevertheless, after reporting that the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk had been put on a Do Not Amplify list, Weiss bizarrely claimed that Twitter had long denied that it does such things, Levitz wrote. Similarly, she suggests that the conservative personalities Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk were placed on blacklists because of their political views. Yet both of these commentators are provocateurs who quite plausibly might have violated the platform's rules regarding abuse at

one point or another. The Twitter files provide limited evidence that the social media platform's former management sometimes enforced its terms of service in inconsistent and politically biased ways. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting

a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. In Vox, Sharon Gaffery wrote about what the Twitter files don't tell us. We don't have a full explanation, for example, of why Twitter limited the reach of these accounts, i.e. whether they were violating the platform's rules on hate speech, health misinformation, or violent content, she said. Without this information, we don't know whether these rules were applied fairly or not. And while Weiss has surfaced specific examples of Twitter limiting

the reach of conservative accounts known for spreading hateful content about the LGBTQ plus community or sharing the big lie about the U.S. presidential election, we don't know if Twitter did the same for some far-left accounts that have also been known for pushing boundaries, such as some former Occupy movement leaders who have complained about Twitter's content moderation in the past. Historically, most Twitter employees, like the rest of big tech, lean liberal. Twitter's conservative critics argue that this presents an inherent bias at the company's content moderation decisions, Gaffrey wrote. Former Twitter employees Recode spoke with this week insisted that content moderation teams operate in good faith to

execute on Twitter's policy rules regardless of personal politics. And research shows that Twitter's recommendation algorithms actually have an inherent bias in favor of right-wing news. What's been shared so far in the Twitter files doesn't offer clear proof that anyone at Twitter made decisions about specific accounts or tweets because of their political affiliation. In MSNBC, Steve Laudeck criticized Musk and others for claiming there was proof Twitter had violated anyone's First Amendment rights. The free speech clause of the First Amendment, like virtually every other provision of the Constitution except the 13th Amendment prohibiting slavery and the 18th Amendment imposing prohibition, applies only to state action. A private business no more violates

the First Amendment by banning particular types of speech in its operations than I violate the First Amendment by not allowing particular types of speech in my home, he said. This brings us to Musk's insinuation that Twitter's actions violated the First Amendment because it was acting under orders from the government. There are at least two problems here, both of which would have been caught by any first-year law student and plenty of undergraduates. First, the Supreme Court has made clear for decades that the government normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the

choice must in law be deemed to be that of the government actor, Vladek said. It is understood that government requests to private entities don't meet this test, absent proof that the private entity did not believe it had any choice but to comply. Even the most conspiratorial reading of the Twitter files fails to undercover such evidence. Second, for those who are inclined to assume compulsion even without evidence, the orders have to come from the government. In October 2020, when the Hunter Biden story broke, neither Joe Biden nor the Biden campaign were the government. Alright, that is it for the left and the right of saying, which brings us to my take. First of all, these were a lot more interesting than the first installment.

When part one of the Twitter files was released, I wrote, quote, there was very little new information that hasn't already been reported out by many outlets. It wasn't that the story wasn't important or the details weren't damning, but there just wasn't any real bombshell or smoking gun file showing Twitter had acted in an obviously unethical way to censor the Hunter Biden story. What it really showed was that there were internal deliberations about the decision, lots of people didn't think it was the right call, and the wrong decision was made. I said this at the time, as did many other commentators on the right call and the wrong decision was made. I said this at the time, as did many other

commentators on the right, and eventually former CEO Jack Dorsey admitted they screwed up. Part 2, 3, 4, and 5 taken together were more interesting. These revelations included screenshots from Twitter administrative dashboards showing tools Twitter uses to suppress the reach of certain accounts. They also showed that the company, in simple terms, came up with new rules and potential violations in order to justify banning President Trump, and that several dissenting internal voices questioned the insular and ambiguous nature of how that decision was made. Additionally, Twitter regularly acted on the censorship requests from agencies like the FBI, DHS, DNI, and political campaigns, and Twitter's head of safety was meeting with

those agencies on a weekly basis. This is all big news. It is not a nothing burger. And even though Twitter is a private company, there are very real free speech questions at play. How critical was the government's role in suggesting what content to suppress? Did these suggestions ever breach the level of coercive or pressuring? How evenly were these standards applied across the political spectrum? Even if these instances ultimately fall short of violating the First Amendment, liberals would do well to recognize free speech issues aren't always government suppression of speech. Private companies can and do suppress speech, and whether that is explicitly unconstitutional is separate from the question of whether it's a societal harm.

Twitter has also been slippery about its position on suppressing these accounts. Many on the left have pointed out that Twitter defines shadowbanning as deliberately making someone's content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster. Many conservatives have claimed to have gotten shadowbanned on the platform. Now, liberals are dismissing those claims, saying there's still no proof Twitter shadow bans as it relates specifically to the definition above. But, as Ben Sturgis pointed out, this is also the most extreme version of this definition, and the conservatives who have said they were shadow banned over the years have obviously not meant that nobody could see their tweets. Rather, those posters meant that

the engagement on their accounts was being artificially limited because of what they were posting and they could tell. Despite these claims getting mocked and derided by journalists on the left, these files show they were, at least in a few cases, actually right. And we have good reason to believe that the active suppression of these accounts was probably more common than we know. If you're on the left, think about it this way. Musk owns Twitter now. He clearly has issues with progressives and has been hammering the quote woke mind virus he thinks is infecting the country. What if Musk, at the guidance of someone like Bari Weiss, were to label anti-Israel protests on Twitter as anti-Semitic hate speech and then instructed Twitter engineers to suppress tweets from Palestinian activists and or suspend

the account sharing those messages? What if simultaneously Twitter execs were meeting with the FBI for guidance on what counts as suspendable? Would liberals react with a shrug and insist that Twitter was a private company so this isn't really a big deal? I doubt it. Which brings me to my final point. Twitter does suppress the voices of people on the left too. The glaring hole in this entire ordeal is that Weiss, Taibbi, and Schellenberger have failed to shed any new light on the ratio of this suppression, who Twitter most often targets, and why. They've shown us a handful of examples of prominent conservatives being throttled, that Twitter will create new standards on the fly in order to justify certain moderation actions, and did so in Trump's case. They've shown

that, around the 2020 election, they were having regular contacts with government agencies, but order to justify certain moderation actions and did so in Trump's case. They've shown that around the 2020 election, they were having regular contacts with government agencies. But again, it's worth remembering this was Trump's government, not Biden's. But none of that tells us the full picture. I could, for example, do a bombshell Twitter thread on all the big oil money being donated to Democrats and frame it as proof that the Democratic Party is owned by fossil fuels and insist that if you want to do something about climate change, you should vote for Republicans. But without also sharing that Republicans similarly take millions from big oil, this would be a misleading narrative to generate. Given the political leanings of Twitter employees,

executives, and the users of the site itself, I do think it's a very safe bet that Twitter's moderation policies are unevenly applied and targeted against conservatives. But again, Taibbi, Weiss, and Schellenberger haven't shown that yet, and Musk has heard his own case by refusing to share the files with journalists outside of these three, who were already on his team before this whole controversy started. As I said after part one, Musk should release the files more widely widely and the journalists involved should flesh out the differences in how moderation decisions were made between liberals and conservatives. I want to see some of the conversations around moderation decisions

made specifically about liberal activists on the platform. On top of the very important information we've already seen, that would add a great deal of context and strength to the narrative they say they have. and strength to the narrative they say they have. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one is from Dave in Healdsburg, California. Dave said, Hi Isaac, has there been any recent developments concerning the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that went kaboom a while back? It hasn't been getting a lot of press lately, and I don't recall hearing anything definite as to who might have been responsible.

Is this getting memory hold? In short, no, there are no new updates. The closest thing we got to an update was a rather juicy story about the discovery of two ships who had turned off their trackers and passed within several miles of the pipeline in the days immediately before the leaks. The ships, which were between 95 and 130 meters long, were spotted by a firm called SpaceKnow, which used machine learning and satellite data to account for the quote-unquote dark ships. It's possible the Automatic Identification System, or AIS, transponders on the two ships had failed, but that is apparently rare. Turning them off is rare too. Usually it's a sign of a ship involved in illegal fishing or shipping contraband

or a clandestine military operation. Space Know says they turned the information over to NATO, who continues to investigate the leaks and has maintained it was a deliberate act of sabotage. That position has been supported by evidence of explosives at the site of the pipeline leaks. For now, I'm not sure we're any closer to understanding who did this than we were in September, but investigations are ongoing. In the meantime, Russia recently resumed delivering gas to Europe on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. All right, next up is our under the radar section. Some of the latest data from the 2022 midterm suggests younger voters support for Democrats may actually be waning, not increasing. Voters under the age of 30 broke 53% for Democratic House candidates compared to just 41% for Republicans

in 2022. But that level of support was down significantly from 2020 when 61% of under 30 voters supported Joe Biden compared to just 36% for Donald Trump. In the 2018 midterms, young voters broke 64% for Democrats compared to 34% for the GOP. Political scientist Michael McDonald cautioned against making a trend out of what could be an anomaly, but said it's possible young voters who have the weakest partisan attachments were hit hardest by inflation and voted accordingly. The Associated Press has more on this story, and there's a link in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. Of the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, France,

Germany, Spain, and Japan, the number of countries where tweets from right-wing politicians received more implication from Twitter's algorithm than those on the left was six out of seven. The amount of money Twitter employees collectively donated to Democrats during the 2020 cycle was $909,431. The amount of money Twitter employees collectively donated to Republicans during the 2020 cycle was $14,137. The total percentage of money donated by Twitter employees in the 2020 cycle that went to Democrats was 98.7%. The number of Twitter employees who signed an open letter in January of 2020 calling on Jack Dorsey to permanently ban Trump from the platform was about 300. letter in January of 2020 calling on Jack Dorsey to permanently ban Trump from the platform

was about 300. Alright, and last but not least, our have a nice day story. NASA scientists say they have just recorded the first ever sounds of dust devils on Mars. When the rover Perseverance landed on Mars, it was equipped with the first working microphone to ever get put on the planet's surface. Now scientists have a recording of a whirlwind which will help them better understand Mars' atmosphere and prepare for future trips. We can learn a lot more using sound than we can with some of the other tools, Roger Wiens, a professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University said. They take readings at regular intervals.

The microphone lets us sample, not quite at the speed of sound, but nearly 100,000 times a second. It helps us get a stronger sense of what Mars is like. The team had observed about 100 dust devils on Mars since landing, but the microphone only records for about three minutes every few days, so this was the first time it actually caught one. Purdue.edu has the story and there's a link in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. We'll be right back here same time tomorrow. Don't forget, if you want to support our work, please go to retangle.com slash membership or just share this podcast with friends and punch that five-star

rating for us anywhere you rate podcasts. We'll see you tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Sean Brady, and Bailey Saul. Shout out to our interns, Audrey Moorhead and Watkins Kelly, and our social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who designed our logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.

For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our website at www.readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older,

and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Thank you.