COVID commentator Alex Berenson says he plans to sue White House over alleged Twitter ban scheme

Former New York Times reporter and COVID commentator Alex Berenson said on Friday that he is planning to sue the Biden administration after the White House allegedly put pressure on Twitter to ban him from the platform last year. 

Berenson became known early on in the COVID-19 pandemic as a sharp critic of the official response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, slamming lockdowns, masking mandates and social distancing rules due to the relative lack of scientific justification for those measures. 

The writer was banned from Twitter last summer after criticizing the COVID vaccines at length; the social media company restored his account earlier this year.

In a Substack post on Friday he claimed to have obtained "internal Twitter communications" revealing that "Biden Administration officials asked Twitter to ban me because of my tweets questioning the Covid vaccine."

White House officials "appear to have gone far beyond generically encouraging Twitter to support Covid vaccines or discourage 'misinformation,'" Berenson claimed, sharing purported screenshots of Slack communications between Twitter employees. "Instead, top officials targeted me personally."

In a followup post on Friday, Berenson wrote: "If you're wondering if I plan to sue the Biden Administration for violating my First Amendment rights by pressing Twitter to ban me...That would be yes." 

"More to come soon," he added.