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YouTube Greatly Expands Its Medical “Misinformation” Policies

New rules, largely determined by the WHO

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 16, 2023

YouTube, the titan of online video content, has expanded its Covid misinformation policy to cover what it calls all forms of medical misinformation.

YouTube has also declared its plan to delist videos promoting “cancer treatments proven to be harmful or ineffective,” effectively disallowing content creators from encouraging natural cures.

The platform pledges to implement its medical misinformation policies when a topic exhibits high public health risks, is supposedly prone to misinformation, and when official guidance from health authorities is accessible to the public.

The changes also see YouTube recommitting to groups such as the WHO and other health bodies on what information is deemed to be acceptable for people to talk about on the platform – despite these institutions having recently received major blows to their credibility.

According to the policy update, YouTube will no longer host content that:

  • Misinforms about prevention techniques or contradicts current health authority guidelines, including inaccuracies regarding the safety or efficacy of approved vaccines.
  • Promotes treatments that local health bodies or the WHO have neither approved nor recognized as safe and effective. Moreover, it bans content that advocates for harmful substances or practices that have been scientifically proven to be detrimental.
  • Denies the existence of specific health conditions.

As stated in its blog post, YouTube intends to punish content promoting not only what it believes to be overtly harmful treatments but also unproven ones that are audaciously offered as replacements for recognized alternatives.

For instance, influencers suggesting vitamin C supplements or garlic for cancer may have their content removed, the post states.

This marks a substantial escalation in the Google-owned platform’s ongoing crusade against what it believes to be the dissemination of medical misinformation, heavily catalyzed by the controversial experience of battling narratives about themes such as COVID-19 and vaccines, something YouTube was heavily criticized for as truthful content ended up being censored on the platform.

YouTube had targeted vaccine “misinformation,” such as demonetizing and deleting vaccine skepticism, thereby refining their approach in response to the global pandemic situation.

August 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | 1 Comment

RFK Jr. Sues YouTube and Google, Alleges ‘Misinformation Policies’ Violated His First Amendment Rights

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 4, 2023

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense founder and chairman on leave, this week filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, alleging the social media giant violated his First Amendment rights.

According to Kennedy, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president of the U.S., YouTube engaged in a “censorship campaign” that included removing videos of his speech at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire and interviews he did with clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and podcaster Joe Rogan.

The complaint, filed Aug. 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges the U.S. government has taken “extraordinary steps” under Joe Biden’s leadership “to silence people it does not want Americans to hear,” including himself and many others.

That censorship makes it difficult for Kennedy to reach millions of voters and also for his supporters to amplify his message, the complaint says.

The lawsuit predicts the censorship will continue throughout Kennedy’s campaign, intensifying as the primaries approach.

“Mr. Kennedy often speaks at length about topics people would like to ignore, including the negative health effects of toxic chemicals and potential safety concerns about the COVID-19 shots,” the complaint reads. Then YouTube uses its “medical misinformation” policies — developed in partnership with federal government agencies and the Biden administration — to justify removing his videos.

In doing so, the platform censored not only Kennedy’s comments on medical issues, but the entire content of his speeches and interviews, according to the suit.

Although YouTube is a private company, it is not simply a publisher, the complaint alleges — it has become “an important platform for political discourse in America, a digital town square that voters trust as a place to get news and opinions about the issues of the day.”

According to the complaint:

“YouTube operates as a public forum, the digital equivalent of a town square. As such, it cannot remove protected speech, especially political speech, based on its viewpoint. …

“There is a sufficiently close nexus between YouTube and the federal government such that YouTube’s actions may be fairly treated as that of the government itself.”

Although YouTube cited its own COVID-19 vaccine misinformation policies to censor Kennedy, those policies “rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored,” according to the lawsuit.

For example, the suit says YouTube doesn’t allow content that “contradicts local health authorities’ (LHA) or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19,” and the guidance on those policies only changes based on government decisions.

Kennedy also called YouTube’s medical misinformation policies “unconstitutional” because they are “vague” and “overbroad” and “because they give unnamed government officials, who the policies depend entirely on, the unfettered discretion to decide what information gets removed from YouTube.”

Kennedy is seeking injunctive relief to prohibit YouTube from further censoring his speech, and the restoration of any videos of his political speech removed during the campaign.

Kennedy also seeks a declaration that Google and YouTube violated his First Amendment rights and that its medical disinformation policies are unconstitutional.

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

August 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube Censors Australian Politician’s Maiden Speech to Parliament

By Rebekah Barnett | Brownstone Institute | July 8, 2023

‘30 minutes of truth bombs’ is how one Twitter user described Liberal Democrat John Ruddick’s maiden speech to the New South Wales (NSW) Parliament, last Wednesday 28 June.

Indeed, Ruddick, who left the Liberal Party in 2021 after public disagreements over the Party’s handling of the pandemic response, said out loud in parliament what many Australians have been saying for some time now – at first privately, around dinner tables, but increasingly more publicly, over workplace water coolers or at the pub, as saying the obvious becomes more socially acceptable.

Nevertheless, what is socially acceptable offline is not necessarily acceptable on social media. YouTube swiftly removed Ruddick’s speech from its platform, just seven hours after it was uploaded. The NSW Liberal Democrats say this is the first time in Australian history that a politician’s maiden speech has been censored by the platform.

The interference of the social media giant in Australia’s political discourse is ironic given this line from Ruddick’s speech: “We libertarians are plotting to take over the world … so we can leave you all alone.”

A spokesperson for the Lib Dems says, “We initially posted the video on party founder Dr John Humphreys’ YouTube account. We then circulated that link on other social media – for example, this tweet from Dr John, which you can see now links to a takedown notice.”

YouTube claims that the video violated its ‘medical misinformation policy’, and implied that removing the video was necessary to ensure that YouTube remains a ‘safe place for all.’

Note the definition of ‘medical misinformation’ as information that, “contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19.”

Hear that? Galileo just rolled in his grave.

So what did Ruddick actually say about Covid that might have disturbed the information gatekeepers?

  • He said that the NSW government had enacted an “authoritarian Covid police state.”
  • He said that the NSW government had given in to “vaccine extremism,” telling the public, ‘we won’t let you out until you take multiple injections of not only a rushed vaccine but of an entirely new class of vaccine’.
  • He said that, “NSW Health published weekly data showing, the fewer vaccines you had, the less likely you went to hospital or ICU. The fatality rate was similar for the vaxxed and the unvaxxed.”
  • He said that, “since the vaccine rollout there has been a 15-20 per cent increase in excess deaths in nations like Australia that had mass mRNA injections,” and questioned whether this might have anything to do with the vaccines, or from locking people up for so long.
  • He said that take-up of the fifth shot is low – “too many know of others with bad reactions.”
  • He said that ivermectin, an anti-viral drug that won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine, was disingenuously smeared as a horse dewormer. He noted the financial incentives for suppressing ivermectin as a potential treatment for Covid, despite researchers around the world testifying to its efficacy.
  • He said that there have been over 137,000 adverse events reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration following Covid vaccination, and that many drugs have been pulled from the market for far less than this.

Agree or disagree as you please, but all these claims are evidence-based. As a friend of mine said when disagreeing with my insistence, in late 2021, that the vaccines would not be effective in preventing/reducing transmission, “We believe different scientists.”

The video of Ruddick’s maiden speech has been reposted on YouTube via the Lib Dems main account, and has not yet been taken down. You can watch the speech in full via the Lib Dems twitter account.

Spectator has also published the transcript of Ruddick’s speech in full.

A spokesperson for the Lib Dems said on Friday,

“We’re obviously very disappointed that YouTube feels the need to censor something not only from NSW Parliament but as time-honoured as a maiden speech, but we also oddly must thank them as we’ve benefited from the Streisand effect.

“The video already has over 225,000 views on one tweet, and is also being viewed in Facebook groups, on Telegram and (for now anyway) a little bit on the federal LibDems YouTube page. The interest in the speech certainly seems to have increased exponentially after the YouTube removal, and we’re getting inundated with positive comments and questions.”

Other notable ‘truth bombs’ from Ruddick’s speech include his criticism of blown-out government debt, and his concern that pursuing a net zero carbon economy is a “reckless folly.”

While the Lib Dems are benefiting from the Streisand effect for the time being, Member of the European Parliament, Christine Anderson, is dealing with YouTube censorship by suing the social media platform. Anderson reports that YouTube blocked two videos from parliamentary sessions in which she acted on the official Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Anderson has described YouTube’s censorship as “anti-democratic,” saying, “I will not put up with uncontrolled influence on this scale, which is why I have now taken the necessary legal steps to… ensure that all citizens have unfiltered access to relevant information at all times.”

Rebekah Barnett reports from Western Australia. She is a volunteer interviewer for Jab Injuries Australia and holds a BA in Communications from the University of Western Australia. Find her work on her Substack page, Dystopian Down Under.

July 8, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 2 Comments

YouTube Censors Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

By Jonathan Turley | June 20, 2023

YouTube has continued its censorship of those with opposing positions on Covid 19 and vaccines. This week it prevented users from hearing the views of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Despite Kennedy running on the failures of the pandemic response, YouTube will not allow users to hear what it considers harmful thoughts.

On Sunday, both Kennedy and podcast host Jordan Peterson tweeted that they were the latest to be censored by the company. Kennedy tweeted: “What do you think… Should social media platforms censor presidential candidates? My conversation with [Peterson] was deleted by [YouTube].”

He added: “Luckily you can watch it here on [Twitter] (thank you [Elon Musk]).”

The incident shows why many on the left continue an unrelenting attack on Musk and Twitter. Musk eliminated most of the company’s censorship system and, despite a few censorship controversies, the site is now the most open social media site among the major companies.

A Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital YouTube “removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube’s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”

Rather than allow experts and others to debate that question, Google and YouTube will not allow the debate to occur. It is consistent with calls from Democratic leaders for dissenting voices to be removed on subjects ranging from Covid to gender identity to climate control.

We have been discussing efforts by figures like Hillary Clinton to enlist European countries to force Twitter to restore censorship rules. Unable to rely on corporate censorship or convince users to embrace censorship, Clinton and others are resorting to good old-fashioned state censorship, even asking other countries to censor the speech of American citizens.

President Joe Biden has at times acted as a virtual censor-in-chief, denouncing social-media companies for “killing people” by not censoring enough. Recently, he expressed doubt that the public can “know the truth” without such censorship by “editors” in Big Tech. There is growing evidence of long-suspected back channels between government and Democratic political figures and Big Tech. Some of those contacts were recently confirmed but Congress again refused to investigate.

For years, scientists faced censorship for even raising the lab theory as a possible explanation for the virus. Their reputations and careers were shredded by a media flash mob. The Washington Post declared this a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times’ Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was calling any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

When a Chinese researcher told Fox News that this was man-made, the network was attacked and the left-leaning PolitiFact slammed her with a “pants on fire rating.”

The mask mandate and other pandemic measures like the closing of schools are now cited as fueling emotional and developmental problems in children. The closing of schools and businesses was challenged by some critics as unnecessary. Many of those critics were also censored. It now appears that they may have been right. Many countries did not close schools and did not experience increases in Covid. However, we are now facing alarming drops in testing scores and alarming rises in medical illness among the young.

The point is only that there were countervailing indicators on mask efficacy and a basis to question the mandates. Yet, there was no real debate because of the censorship supported by many Democratic leaders in social media. To question such mandates was declared a public health threat and what the WHO called our “infodemic.”

A lawsuit was filed by Missouri and Louisiana and joined by leading experts, including Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya (Stanford University) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University). Bhattacharya previously objected to the suspension of Dr. Clare Craig after she raised concerns about Pfizer trial documents. Those doctors were the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates. Many are now questioning the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdown as well as the real value of masks and the rejection of natural immunities as an alternative to vaccination.  Yet, these experts and others were attacked for such views just a year ago. Some found themselves censored on social media for challenging claims of Dr. Fauci and others.

The media has quietly acknowledged the science questioning mask efficacy and school closures without addressing its own role in attacking those who raised these objections.

Yet, the censorship continues to the point that even a presidential candidate is now being silenced on social media.

The censorship of Kennedy is a national disgrace. Despite the proven legitimacy of prior censorship of viewpoints like the lab theory and natural immunities, Google continues to silence those with opposing views.

YouTube is signaling that this election will be another exercise in corporate approved messaging and ideas.

If you want to use YouTube, you will now have to engage in self-censorship, eliminating views that Google disagrees with. You may be able to “Broadcast Yourself” but you must first “Censor Yourself” . . .  or YouTube will do it for you.

June 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Google Renews Its Partnership With The WHO

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | May 25, 2023

Google has renewed its partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide what it calls “factual” information about different diseases and conditions. The partnership is positioned as a way to combat what it says is the spread of medical “misinformation” observed during the pandemic.

On Google search, there are already Knowledge Panels at the top of results when users search for certain conditions and diseases.

Soon, the Knowledge Panels will include more conditions and illnesses like depressive disorder, Ebola, COPD, malaria, hypertension, diabetes, Mpox, and others, all using information verified by the WHO.

In a previous partnership, Google awarded more than $320 million to the WHO in Ad Grants to help spread its medical information. In the new partnership, Google awarded the global public health organization an additional $50 million to continue the efforts.

The WHO has been criticized more in frequent years for calling for censorship while itself putting out information during the pandemic that turned out to ultimately be untrue.

Google’s YouTube was criticized for censoring anything that went against the WHO during the pandemic, even if independent commentators ended up being correct.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

First COVID Vaccine Injury Lawsuit in U.S. Targets U.S. Government, Social Media Giants

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 23, 2023

Five people injured by COVID-19 vaccines, along with a father whose 16-year-old son died from vaccine-induced cardiac arrest, are suing the Biden administration and top U.S. public health officials.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, the plaintiffs — including Brianne Dressen who suffered severe nerve damage after taking the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine — allege the U.S. government colluded with social media companies to censor them when they posted stories about their personal vaccine injury experiences.

Defendants include President Biden and top-ranking White House officials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

This is the first lawsuit brought by U.S. citizens injured by the COVID-19 vaccines.

Dressen — a preschool teacher from Saratoga Springs, Utah — volunteered to participate in AstraZeneca’s clinical trial for its COVID-19 shot. Now, she says, she is “collateral damage of the pandemic.”

Dressen co-chairs React19, a “science-based non-profit offering financial, physical, and emotional support for those suffering from longterm COVID-19 vaccine adverse events globally.”

After receiving the AstraZeneca shot, Dressen experienced extensive adverse effects — including doubled and blurry vision, severe sensitivity to sound and light, heart and blood pressure fluctuations and intense brain fog — that worsened over time.

She said Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, GoFundMe, Reddit and Instagram removed content she posted about her injuries.

According to Dressen, the plaintiffs’ experiences of censorship “pale in comparison to the thousands of Americans we know who all have experienced the same thing.”

“There is nothing scarier than reaching out for help only to be silenced,” Dressen told The Defender. “It was as scary as the vaccine reaction itself.

“Our constitutional freedoms must be protected, regardless of whether or not we are in a national emergency,” Dressen added.

Dressen — who now experiences “permanent disability” with “ups and downs” — said she and the other plaintiffs are “not fighting this fight for a select few” but are fighting on behalf of the “tens of thousands who are experiencing the same kind of censorship.”

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) filed the suit on behalf of Dressen and the other plaintiffs, who include Kristi Dobbs, Nikki Holland, Suzanna Newell and Ernest Ramirez.

All but Ramirez experienced COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries. Ramirez received the Moderna vaccine with no adverse effect  — but his 16-year-old son died of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest five days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

Newell is a former triathlete from St. Paul, Minnesota, who was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after she got the vaccine and who now relies on a walker or cane to get around.

Case challenges ‘shocking’ government mass-censorship

According to the complaint, the plaintiffs experienced “heavy and ongoing censorship” on social media platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and GoFundMe — “when they attempted to share “ their personal experiences after they, or a loved one, were medically harmed after taking the vaccine.”

For instance, TikTok on multiple occasions removed Holland’s video posts in which she shared her personal experiences related to her COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries and recovery process.

TikTok said the videos violated “Community Guidelines” for posting “violent and graphic content” and for “integrity and authenticity” concerns.

According to the complaint:

“This case challenges the government’s mass-censorship program and the shocking role that it has played (and still plays) in ensuring that disfavored viewpoints deemed a threat to its agenda are suppressed.

“This sprawling censorship enterprise has involved the efforts of myriad federal agencies and government actors (including within the White House itself) to direct, coerce, and, ultimately, work in concert with social media platforms to censor, muffle, and flag as ‘misinformation’ speech that conflicts with the government’s preferred narrative — including speech that the government explicitly acknowledges to be true.”

Kim Mack Rosenberg, the Children Health Defense’s (CHD) acting outside general counsel, said the new lawsuit is important because it exists “at the intersection” of COVID-19 vaccine injury and COVID-19 censorship.

“The complaint here alleges — as have other cases — a massive censorship program to control the narrative and promote the government’s COVID-19 propaganda,” Mack Rosenberg told The Defender.

She added:

“Silencing those who have been injured, like the plaintiffs in this case, by the very product promoted — and in some cases mandated — by the government is particularly egregious and causes further, albeit, different injury to those individuals, whose First Amendment rights have also been violated.

“Moreover, censoring these injured individuals injures the public, depriving them of important information and discourse on these issues.”

Missouri and Louisiana in May 2022 filed a landmark lawsuit against top-ranking Biden administration officials for allegedly colluding with social media giants to suppress free speech on topics like COVID-19 and election security.

Former Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt alleges the Biden administration led “the largest speech censorship operation in recent history” by working with social media companies to suppress and censor information later acknowledged as truthful.”

In March, CHD Chairman on Leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CHD filed a class action lawsuit against Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies, alleging they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech, including facts and opinions about the COVID-19 vaccines.

Commenting on the new lawsuit, Peggy Little, senior litigation counsel for NCLA, said in a statement:

“Americans injured by experimentally approved Covid vaccines are being deplatformed, silenced, suppressed, defamed and cancelled by their own government for reaching out to others simply to share and receive information critical to their physical and mental well-being.

“Government actors have bullied, threatened and coerced social media companies to strip these plaintiffs of their First Amendment rights of association and speech. Suppression of speech critical of the government by the very government actors mandating the vaccine is frightening.

“NCLA’s lawsuit seeks to restore these plaintiffs’ civil liberties and the free flow of information guaranteed by the First Amendment for all Americans. We must never again lose our constitutional bearings in a pandemic.”

Casey Norman, one of the NCLA lawyers representing Dressen and the other plaintiffs, agreed. He said that the government claims it suppresses “so-called misinformation” for the sake of “public safety and welfare.”

“Fortunately,” Norman added, “the First Amendment says otherwise: the government may neither censor our clients nor induce others to do so.”

Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

May 24, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

YouTube suspends pro-Trump network on eve of President Trump’s arraignment

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 4, 2023

YouTube has suspended the channel of Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) for allegedly violating its election misinformation policies. The 7-day ban came a day before Donald Trump’s arraignment in Manhattan, and the network’s coverage of the arraignment.

RSBN is an independent media organization founded in 2015, primarily focused on providing conservative news coverage and commentary in the United States.

The network gained prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign by live-streaming Donald Trump’s rallies and events. Since then, the network has continued to cover conservative political events, speeches, and interviews, while also providing analysis and opinion on relevant topics.

RSBN is recognized for its pro-Trump stance and sharing of conservative viewpoints in the media landscape.

On Monday, the network received a notice that several of its videos, including an exclusive interview with Trump in Mar-a-Lago, his recent rally in Waco, Texas, and his comments at the most recent CPAC event, had been removed for violating its election misinformation policies.

Aside from violating policies against making claims of fraud in the 2020 elections and 2022 election in , the videos were also removed for lack of “countervailing views.”

Because of the violations, YouTube imposed one strike and temporarily suspended the channel for a week, the same week when President Trump became the first US President in history to face criminal charges.

“Accordingly, the videos have been removed and a strike has been applied to the channel, and as a result, uploads and live streams by your account are suspended for a week. You can read more about our strikes system here,” a YouTube representative told RSBN.

“Conveniently, YouTube’s Orwellian censorship practices have returned just one day before President Trump is arraigned in a gross weaponization of the justice system,” RBN said in a statement.

“Rather than allowing RSBN to show a countervailing view to the mainstream media’s version of the arraignment, they are simply shutting down our efforts. Again, they are leaving millions of Americans voiceless in the face of tyranny.”

This isn’t the first time RSBN has been suspended from YouTube just hours before a planned event.

April 8, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

RFK, Jr. and CHD Sue Biden, Fauci for Alleged Censorship

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 28, 2023

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) on Friday filed a class action lawsuit against President Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies, alleging they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.

Kennedy, CHD and Connie Sampognaro filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Monroe Division, on behalf of all the more than 80% of Americans who access news from online news aggregators and social media companies, principally Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

The plaintiffs allege top-ranking government officials, along with an “ever-growing army of federal officers, at every level of the government” from the White House to the FBI, the CIA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lesser-well-known federal agencies of inducing those companies:

“to stifle viewpoints that the government disfavors, to suppress facts that the government does not want the public to hear, and to silence specific speakers — in every case critics of federal policy — whom the government has targeted by name.”

Kennedy, chairman and chief litigation counsel of CHD, said American Democracy itself is at stake in this case:

“U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, ‘Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.’ It also violates the Constitution.

“The collaboration between the White House and health and intelligence agency bureaucrats to silence criticism of presidential policies is an assault on the most fundamental foundation stone of American Democracy.”

The lawsuit’s argument rests on the Norwood Principle, an “axiomatic,” or self-evident, principle of constitutional law that says the government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

According to the plaintiffs, the U.S. government used the social media companies as a proxy to illegally censor free speech.

The complaint cites the now-weekly, ongoing disclosures of secret communications between social media companies and federal officials — in the “Twitter files,” other lawsuits and news reports — which revealed threats by Biden and other top officials against social media companies if they failed to aggressively censor.

The suit points to examples where the censorship campaign allegedly trampled First Amendment freedoms, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, the COVID-19 Wuhan lab-leak theory and the suppression of facts and opinions about the COVID-19 vaccines.

The plaintiffs do not seek financial damages. Instead, they seek a declaration that these practices by federal agents violate the First Amendment and a nationwide injunction against the federal government’s effort to censor constitutionally protected online speech.

The complaint points to a Supreme Court decision that said social media platforms are “the modern public square” and argues that all Americans who access news online have a First Amendment right against censorship of protected speech in that public square.

Jed Rubenfeld, one of the attorneys arguing the case filed Friday, explained why the lawsuit was filed as a class action:

“Social media platforms are the modern public square. For years, the government has been pressuring, promoting, and inducing the companies that control that square to impose the same kind of censorship that the First Amendment prohibits.

“This lawsuit challenges that censorship campaign, and we hope to bring it to an end. The real victim is the public, which is why we’ve brought this suit as a class action on behalf of everyone who accesses news from social media.”

According to the complaint, when the administration violates the First Amendment of an entire class of people, the judiciary must step in to protect American’s constitutional rights:

“Apart from the Judiciary, no branch of our Government, and no other institution, can stop the current Administration’s systematic efforts to suppress speech through the conduit of social-media companies.

“Congress can’t, the Executive won’t, and States lack the power to do so. The fate of American free speech, as it has so often before, lies once again in the hands of the courts.”

The lawsuit also names Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Commerce, DHS, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and other individuals and agencies — 106 defendants in total.

‘The largest federally sanctioned censorship operation’ ever seen

According to the lawsuit, efforts by federal officials to induce social media platforms to censor speech began in 2020 with the suppression of the COVID-19 lab leak theory and reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Once President Biden took office in January 2021, senior White House officials reported the Biden team began “direct engagement” with social media companies to “clamp down” on speech the White House disfavored, which officials called “misinformation.”

Revelations would later prove the administration was asking social media companies to suppress not only putatively false speech but also speech it knew to be “wholly accurate” along with expressions of opinion.

This practice, it alleges, spread from the administration and through the entire government, becoming “a government-wide campaign to achieve through the intermediation of social media companies exactly the kind of content-based and viewpoint-based censorship of dissident political speech that the First Amendment prohibits.”

Similar allegations about this massive federal censorship campaign also so were alleged by the plaintiffs in the Missouri. v. Biden case, but this case introduces many new allegations.

Some, but not all, examples of government-coordinated suppression of free speech on social media cited in the complaint include the following:

  • Substantial evidence of coordinated efforts by Fauci and others to suppress the lab-leak theory, which remains plausible and supported by evidence.
  • Extensive email communication between Fauci and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, demonstrating Facebook and other social media companies adopted policies that identified any claims about the lab-leak hypothesis to be “false” and “debunked.”
  • Facebook’s admission that its censorship of COVID-19-related speech, on supposed grounds of falsity, is based on what “public health experts have advised us.”
  • Public statements by Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a result of communications from the FBI.
  • Extensive public commentary by FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan about his work with social media companies and CISA to discuss suppression of election-related speech on social media.
  • “Twitter files” documents on Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
  • “Twitter files” documents demonstrating weekly meetings between agents from the FBI’s 80-agent social media task force and Twitter to discuss content suppression along with direct payments from the FBI to Twitter for compliance with requests.
  • CISA’s work with the Center for Internet Security, a third-party group, to flag content, including particular individuals, for censorship on social media.
  • “Twitter files” evidence about the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a vast network of high-level interactions with the federal government and social media platforms — which included proposals, ultimately adopted, for the U.S. government to establish its own “disinformation” board. One free-speech advocate described the EIP as “the largest federally-sanctioned censorship operation” he had ever seen.
  • Documents demonstrating after the election, the EIP was transformed into the “Virality Project,” which was dedicated to “take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”
  • Threats by congressional representatives, senators and Biden to break up Big Tech if they did not improve censorship practices.
  • Census Bureau documents describing work by its “Trust & Safety” team with social media platforms to “counter false information.”
  • “Twitter files” documents, news reports, and documents received through Freedom of Information Act requests that demonstrated myriad, consistent communications with Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) and numerous Biden administration officials named as defendants in the lawsuit including Murthy, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, officials from the CDC, DHS, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, CISA, the U.S. State Department, the White House — including White House Counsel — and other agencies about how to take action against “misinformation” related to COVID-19.

This last set of communications included action against the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” which includes Kennedy. According to the complaint, “Facebook itself has stated that the infamous ‘disinformation dozen’ claim has no factual support.”

Kennedy tweeted some of the evidence that the White House directly censored him.

The complaint alleges that the collusion between the administration, federal agencies and social media companies to suppress constitutionally protected free speech now also extends beyond the election and COVID-19-related commentary to include suppression of speech on topics such as climate change, “clean energy,” “gendered disinformation,” pro-life pregnancy resource centers and other topics.

It also alleges, based on research from the Media Research Center that identified hundreds of instances of censored critiques of Biden, that social media companies “have achieved astonishing success in muzzling public criticism of Joe Biden.”

It argues that the defendants’ power over social media gives them a “historically unprecedented power over public discourse in America — a power to control what hundreds of millions of people in this county can say, see, and hear.”

CHD President Mary Holland, who also serves as CHD general counsel, told The Defender :

“If Government can censor its critics, there is no atrocity it cannot commit. The public has been deprived of truthful, life-and-death information over the last three years. This lawsuit aims to have government censorship end, as it must, because it is unlawful under our constitution.”

The lawsuit asks the court to permanently enjoin them from, “taking any steps to demand, urge, pressure, or otherwise induce any social-media platform to censor, suppress, de-platform, suspend, shadow-ban, de-boost, restrict access to constitutionally protected speech, or take any other adverse action against any speaker, protected content or viewpoint expressed on social media.”

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

March 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

US State Department funds UK think tank that aids in censorship of Americans

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 16, 2023

The US State Department funds UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an organization that partners with platforms to flag misinformation and disinformation. The organization has been accused of classifying conservative viewpoints as hate and disinformation.

In September 2021, the State Department awarded ISD a grant to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in the UK and Europe after it won the US-Paris Tech Challenge. The challenge was also won by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that has been accused of demonetizing conservative news websites by putting them on a blacklist used by advertisers, the Daily Caller reported.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) funded the ISD to research Russian disinformation tactics on Wikipedia. However, the department insisted that it does not engage in content moderation on social media.

ISD has several partnerships with social media platforms on content moderation decisions. The organization is a member of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council, which advises the platform on how to respond to misinformation.

ISD is also part of ’s Trusted Flagger program, whose members are tasked with improving the platform’s enforcement of its guidelines and can flag more content than other users.  said that it “prioritizes flags from Trusted Flaggers.”

The organization also has partnerships with Google to counter hate and extremism in the UK and Europe. It also partners with Amazon’s Audible, , and Microsoft.

ISD is mostly focused on extremism and terrorism. However, it has also been targeting what it deems misinformation and hate.

February 16, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , | 1 Comment

Facebook and Instagram delete Project Veritas video confronting YouTube executive over censorship

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | February 4, 2023

’s  and  platforms have removed a video by Project Veritas showing a journalist confronting YouTube’s Vice President of Trust and Safety Matt Halprin about the censorship of a video showing a Pfizer executive talking about mutating viruses.

Both platforms claimed that the video was in violation of Community Standards, specifically the policy prohibiting “content that could lead to identity theft or put someone at risk of physical or financial harm.”

In the video that was removed by both platforms, Project Veritas’ journalist Christian Hartsock asked Halprin why he banned a video showing Pfizer’s Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations Jordan Trishton Walker talking about mutating viruses.

“How much is Pfizer paying you to run cover for them?” said Hartsock. “Is YouTube brought to us by Pfizer?”

On January 25, Project Veritas posted a video of Walker talking about the company mutating COVID-19 virus. Walker later said he made it up.

“Well, one of the things we’re exploring is, why don’t we just mutate it ourselves so we could preemptively develop new vaccines, right?” said Walker.

“If we’re gonna do that, though, there’s a risk of, as you can imagine, no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating fucking viruses.”

YouTube banned the video.

February 4, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | 2 Comments

Social media’s history of suppressing Palestine content

By Kathryn Shihadah | Israel-Palestine News | December 12, 2022

For years, social media have been making it difficult for Palestinian and their allies’ voices to be heard – even as Israel’s stranglehold on Palestinians has grown stronger, and as increasing amounts of US tax money have been sent to Israel and to various countries for Israel’s direct benefit.

Social media users, especially Palestinian human rights advocates, have reported puzzling occurrences on the major platforms Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram – especially during times of Israeli crackdowns.

Users who shared information on the situation in the Palestinian territories described posts being deleted as “hate speech or symbols,” or “violence,” inexplicably losing followers and views of their content, or having entire accounts abruptly frozen or deleted.

One rights group documented over 700 instances of social media networks restricting or removing Palestinian content in May 2021 alone, during a time of especially heavy Israeli state violence.

Another group reported that nearly half of the Palestinian-themed content that disappeared off of Instagram during this time period

occurred without the company providing the user a prior warning or notice. In an additional 20 percent of the cases, Instagram notified the user but did not provide a specific justification for restricting the content.

When users appealed the censorship, often their content or account would be restored, with a message that it never should have been deleted to begin with. But by the time this resolution came, the opportunity to inform and influence readers was past.

For example, in May 2021, during a time of escalating Israeli violence, Twitter restricted the account of Palestinian-American journalist Mariam Barghouti, who had been posting photos and videos of the violence in Jerusalem. It later restored Barghouti’s account and apologized for the suspension, saying it was done “by mistake.”

A long report on social media actions regarding Israel-Palestine in the Columbia Journalism Review pointed out: “Some of those who have been covering such issues for years don’t think these kinds of things are a mistake; rather, they believe social networks are deliberately censoring Palestinian content.”

Barghouti explained the significance of Twitter to the Palestinian rights movement:

It’s our only avenue for speaking with the world from under a military occupation that controls all our entry and exit points. We’re left to share through soundbites of 280 characters. If even that is taken away, we’re looking at the slaughter of Palestinians in silence.

Social media suppression is particularly critical since mainstream media tend not to cover Israel and Palestine with the kind of accuracy and context that would enable Americans to understand the issue.

In essence, social media have been preventing the victims of Israeli violence from sharing their experiences or building support for their plight.

Excuses

Although owned by two different companies, the three platforms, Twitter and Facebook/Instagram, have offered duplicate “explanations” for what has happened, including glitches that just happened to affect posts and hashtags about Israel, and  “widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic.”

One Facebook spokesperson stated,
While these [glitches] have been fixed, they should never have happened in the first place. We’re so sorry to everyone who felt they couldn’t bring attention to important events, or who felt this was a deliberate suppression of their voice. This was never our intention – nor do we ever want to silence a particular community or point of view.
Human rights advocates familiar with the years-long social media battle were not convinced.

TRT World reported another case in which Twitter restricted information on Palestine:

Pro-Palestinian activist Hebh Jamal’s Twitter was targeted with complaints over a post detailing an emotional conversation between her husband and his little cousin in Gaza. The young cousin admitted to wanting to brush his hair before sleeping for fear that the Israeli fire may kill him in his sleep. He said he wanted to look good in case he died. Hebh’s post was flagged for deletion, and restricted by Twitter.

Since the German government has implemented legal measures to make social media companies accountable to users, Twitter later confessed to Hebh that the complaints against her post were baseless. Under German law, Twitter has to inform the user if their post or account is being investigated. This only applies because Hebh and her family reside in Germany. For most Palestinians hailing from Gaza City, there’s a different set of rules, and a radically different set of rights.

TRT reports: “Hebh now faces a video review for every post she makes. She’s also been reported on TikTok as well, with her account deleted before.”

Journalist Bayan Ishtaiwi explained: “For Palestinians sealed-off in open-air prisons like Gaza, social media is all they have. Whoever uses words like occupation or martyr, is penalized for three days at least, which happened to me, or face a ban on live videos for a month.”

Whistleblowing

A group of Instagram employees confirmed the human rights activists’ suspicions when they protested the platform’s blocking of pro-Palestinian content during Israel’s violence in May 2021 – even after the issue had already been reported.

An employee circulated an internal document, which was later shared with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in which he asked,

Can we investigate the reasons why posts and stories pertaining to Palestine lately have had limited reach and engagement, especially when more people than ever from around the world are watching the situation unfold?

Other employees added comments, including,

I’d really like to understand what exactly is breaking down here and why. What is being done to fix it given that this is an issue that was brought up a week ago?

Soon after, nearly 200 Facebook employees signed on to an open letter demanding that Facebook address the allegations of censorship.

Israel calls the shots

Foreign Policy reports:

“Since 2015, the Israeli Justice Ministry has operated a Cyber Unit that has issued tens of thousands of content removal requests to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, mostly alleging violent incitement or support for terrorism.

Technically, these requests are voluntary. They are not legally binding and are therefore not tracked in the transparency reports that technology companies use to disclose formal government censorship orders.

Nonetheless, social media companies have complied with the Cyber Unit’s requests roughly 90 percent of the time.”

Israel’s infamous Cyber Unit patrols social media, searching for “incriminating” content, passing along thousands of requests to social media administrators to remove what the unit finds unacceptable.

In 2016, the Israeli government and Facebook agreed to collaborate on ways to combat what Israel considers “incitement to violence” on the platform.

Then-justice minister Ayelet Shaked noted that at the time, Facebook’s compliance with Israel’s requests to take down content was up to 95%, but expressed hopes that the plan would result in even more censorship.

Neither Israel nor the platforms have been transparent about this practice.

In 2020, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs issued a report on allegedly “phony” online profiles that put out content critical of Israel.

Within a day, Twitter “suspended dozens of Palestinian and pro-Palestine accounts,” claiming the information they circulated violated its terms of service.

It may be noteworthy that both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk have had private audiences with top Israeli leaders.

Israelis abound in Silicon Valley, with about 60,000-100,000 in the Bay Area, and Israel partisans are also ever-present. A recent photo of Musk shared on Twitter was of him with his friend Ari Emanuel, son of a former Irgun terrorist and brother of Rahm Emanuel, who once volunteered with the IDF.

One Palestinian activist summed up the situation:

Rather than being some kind of enabler of democracy, social media has come to be the epitome of political silencing and repression as tech giants have collaborated with various oppressive governments, including the Israeli government, to censor and delete content that exposes their true oppressive character.

Facebook, Instagram report card

Facebook’s Oversight Board recommended that Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) undergo an evaluation of its treatment of Palestinian content in May 2021. Meta hired the consulting company Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) for the work.

Jewish Currents summarized BSR’s final report in an article entitled “Human Rights Due Diligence of Meta’s Impacts in Israel and Palestine”:

The report underscored heavy-handed content moderation by Facebook and Instagram, which Palestinian social media users claim censors critics of Israeli repression.

These restrictions have undermined Palestinian users’ effort to use social media to document Israeli human rights abuses.

BSR contrasted Meta’s over-enforcement of Palestinian social media posts with its under-enforcement of Hebrew-language posts, which the report attributes to Meta installing an algorithmic “hostile speech classifier” for Arabic, but not for Hebrew.

The report concludes that Arabic language content is over-regulated because Hamas, the ruling, elected party in Gaza, is on Facebook’s blacklist, so it was standard to remove posts that appeared to “praise, support, or represent” that group or others on the list.

Other reasons for the interference lie in the fact that the Palestinian content was not reviewed by Palestinian dialect speakers of Arabic, nor was the algorithm developed with the proper “linguistic and cultural competence.”

Internet policy experts summed up the situation at Facebook and the other platforms:

Social media companies have] shown a willingness to silence Palestinian voices if it means avoiding potential political controversy and pressure from the Israeli government.

“Unintentional”? Really?

BSR’s report speculated that the impact of Facebook’s actions – Palestinian users’ loss of rights to expression – was unintentional. Rights groups disagreed.

Dozens of groups signed a public statement in response to BSR’s report, insisting that they had been

calling Meta’s attention to the disproportionately negative impact of its content moderation on Palestinians for years, [so] even if the bias started out as unintentional, after knowing about the issues for years and not taking appropriate action, the unintentional became intentional.

Looking ahead

The BSR report ends with 21 recommendations to Meta, some of which Meta has committed to, either fully or in part.

Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager for a digital rights group, had mixed feelings:

The report validates the lived experiences of Palestinians… They cannot tell us anymore that this is a system glitch. Now they know the root causes…

But regarding Israel’s interference in content restriction, he added,

We’ve wanted more clarity on this because Meta refuses to provide answers. Users deserve transparency on whether their piece of content has been removed as a result of the Israeli government’s request.

Bottom line

Social media have for years – and for various reasons – repressed content about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

In some particularly egregious situations, like Israel’s aggression in May 2021, the companies have offered excuses and apologies. But impartial analysis has proven these excuses false and the apologies hollow.

Not only are social media platforms inherently skewed to over-regulate Palestinian voices, but they are influenced by a powerful foreign government (and no doubt, its US lobby) to an extent we can only imagine.

And Palestinians continue dying.

A report in Foreign Policy by Emerson T. Brooking and Eliza Campbell described the situation with rare eloquence:

The 4.8 million residents of the occupied Palestinian territories live in two simultaneous and vastly different realities. In the physical world, Palestinians are captives, crammed into Gaza or West Bank enclaves and blockaded by Israeli military checkpoints…

But on the internet, the checkpoints disappear. Palestinians can converse with family from whom they are separated by barbed wire and machine gun emplacements. They can share their stories with observers and sympathizers around the world.

In doing so, Palestinians can call themselves citizens of a sovereign State of Palestine: one recognized by 138 countries and admitted in 2012 as a non-member observer state to the United Nations. This second, digital Palestine represents a fulfilment of the internet’s optimistic and largely forgotten promise to give voice to the voiceless and illuminate the darkest corners of the world.

It is also under threat of being extinguished. This is due to a confluence of three forces. The first is the expansive police and surveillance apparatus of the State of Israel, which is used to track, intimidate, and imprison Palestinians in the occupied territories for their online speech.

The second is a network of formal and informal institutions used by the Israeli government to target pro-Palestinian expression across the globe.

The third—and most surprising—force is that of American social media companies, which have shown a willingness to silence Palestinian voices if it means avoiding potential political controversy and pressure from the Israeli government.

Together, these forces demonstrate how it is possible for an ostensibly democratic government to suppress a popular online movement with the acquiescence of ostensibly liberal Silicon Valley executives. The playbook being pioneered against Palestinians will not stay in the Middle East forever. In time, it may be deployed against activist communities around the world.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya says he “strongly” suspects federal government directed Twitter to blacklist his account

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 9, 2022

Stanford University Medical School professor and epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has responded to the bombshell revelation that Twitter secretly blacklisted his account by suggesting that the federal government could have been pulling the strings of this censorship.

“I suspect very strongly that there was some government direction of this,” Bhattacharya said during an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. ”

Bhattacharya continued by discussing the findings from a Biden administration-social media censorship collusion lawsuit that he’s involved in.

The documents that have been released and the sworn statements that have been made as part of this lawsuit have revealed that federal government officials have pressured Big Tech companies to censor many pieces of content that they deemed to be “misinformation.”

One of the documents that’s pertinent to Bhattacharya is an email from then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony Fauci where he called for a “quick and devastating published takedown” of the premises of The Great Barrington Declaration — an anti-lockdown statement published by Bhattacharya and other leading epidemiologists.

“We’ve uncovered tremendous evidence that… there were federal agencies that were… directing social media companies about what to censor, even who to censor,” Bhattacharya told Ingraham. “If that is actually the case… that this blacklisting was directed by the government against American citizens, that’s a direct violation of my civil rights, it’s a direct violation of the , and every American should be outraged.”

Bhattacharya continued: “A lot of the leadership of Silicon Valley, a lot of… the people who give advice to Silicon Valley and to the government about about these content moderation policies, they’ve gone… way too far.”

The Stanford professor also commented on the far-reaching implications of this censorship of discussions about basic scientific policy.

“Imagine how different [things would have been],” Bhattacharya said. “All the small businesses could have stayed open, all the people that wouldn’t have missed their cancer screenings, all the kids that wouldn’t be depressed and suicidal, all the learning loss that could have been avoided if we just had an open scientific discussion.”

Additionally, Bhattacharya suggested that the censors deployed these tactics because “their arguments were not strong enough to survive the light of day” and called for a “national conversation that brings us back to the American commitment to free speech rights, the American commitment to… open discussion, and… honest dealings.”

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), the legal group that’s representing Bhattacharya in the Biden admin-Big Tech censorship collusion lawsuit, said:

“We already know the federal government had a hand in  censorship, especially of those who articulated perspectives that conflicted with government messaging on covid. As Elon Musk exposes further information about Twitter’s inner workings, we anticipate learning more about the extent of government involvement in blacklisting those who express disfavored views.”

Not only does the recent disclosure about Bhattacharya’s account being blacklisted shine a light on the pervasiveness of Big Tech’s censorship but it also demonstrates that Twitter was still engaged in this censorship more than a year after the pandemic began with Bhattacharya only joining Twitter in August 2021.

Twitter’s blacklisting of Bhattacharya’s account is the latest of several examples of the tech giants censoring him after he challenged the government’s Covid narrative. Reddit mods deleted The Great Barrington Declaration, Facebook deleted The Great Barrington Declaration page, and  deleted a public health roundtable featuring The Great Barrington Declaration authors, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and former White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Scott Atlas.

December 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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