Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly – WSJ
On July 4, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty temporarily blocked numerous federal agencies and the White House from collaborating with social-media companies and third-party groups to censor speech.
Discovery in Missouri v. Biden exposed relationships among government agencies and social-media firms and revealed an additional layer of university centers and self-styled disinformation watchdogs and fact-checking outfits.
Elon Musk s release of some of Twitter s internal files revealed that up to 80 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were embedded with social-media companies. The agents mostly weren t fighting terrorism but flagging wrongthink by American citizens, including eminent scientists who suggested different paths on Covid policy.
The results of these relationships? Twitter blacklisted Stanford physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya for showing Covid almost exclusively threatened the elderly, severely reducing the visibility of his tweets. When Stanford health policy scholar Scott Atlas began advising the White House, YouTube erased his most prominent video opposing lockdowns. Twitter banned Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA vaccine technology, for calling attention to the vaccines dangers. YouTube demonetized evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who suggested the virus might be engineered and predicted vaccine-evading variants. And those are only a few examples.
Social-media platforms were powerful tools for full-spectrum censorship, but they didn t act alone. Medical schools, medical boards, science journals and legacy media sang from the same hymnal.
Legions of doctors stayed quiet after witnessing the demonization of their peers who challenged the Covid orthodoxy. A little censorship leads people to watch what they say. Millions of patients and citizens were deprived of important insights as a result.
Health authorities and TV doctors insisted young people were vulnerable, demanded toddlers wear masks, closed schools, beaches and parks, and were loath to contemplate crucial cost-benefit analysis. The economy? Mental health? Never heard of them.
via www.wsj.com
Brett Swanson.