Analysis: How Censorship Has Exploded In Recent Years, Part 2
Analysis: How Censorship Has Exploded In Recent Years, Part 2
An expansion of censorship was experienced during 2020-2022 all over the world. From East to West, regimes have used the pretext of a crisis to restrict the free flow of opinions and open discourse.
Continued from "How censorship has exploded in recent years, part 1"
Main thesis:
Covid-19 health crisis offered an additional pretext for widening speech restrictions in many countries, including via Big Tech companies at their media platforms
In the US, there are signs of systematic collusion between government authorities and social media companies in order to suppress non-conforming views
In the EU, legislative acts have been adopted for tackling so-called hate speech, misinformation and disinformation online, which have been used, amongst other objectives, to direct Big Tech companies to censor non-conventional views, e.g. on Covid-19
Stigamatizing and "fact-checking" has been used by government authorities and Big Tech to legitimize censorship in order for it to appear more acceptable for the larger public
Censorship is continuing after the health crisis as a growing tendency that can be observed in labelling disagreement as "misinformation", especially by those executing power and contesting differing opinions
Means of censorship: labelling and fact-checking industry
"Misinformation" and "disinformation" have become useful terms for many who are irritated by an opinion or information which does not match their own views or interests. Disagreement has conveniently been labelled as "misinformation" especially by those executing power and contesting any divergent views.
Youtube has removed more than a million videos from its platform, labelling them "misinformation". For one, it has censored doctors and scientists that diverged from the official line in regards to Covid-19 since the early days of the crisis in the spring of 2020. For instance in April 2021, YouTube removed a video of a roundtable chaired by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and four medical experts (Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Scott Atlas) in which the group questioned the effectiveness of requiring children to wear masks in school. Their comments were regarded as a violation of Youtube's “Covid-19 medical misinformation” policies. In effect, Youtube has removed many of the videos challenging the official narrative, regardless of how factual or well-evidenced they have been.
Since 2020, Facebook has removed over 3000 accounts, pages and groups for repeatedly violating their rules against "spreading Covid-19 and vaccine misinformation" and removed more than 20 million pieces of content. For instance, in the summer of 2022 it removed a vaccine injury support group with more than 250 000 members from its platform, where people were giving accounts of relatives who had died shortly after having had the Covid-19 vaccine. Facebook also removes content which claims vaccines are more dangerous than the disease they protect against or that they are toxic. Such rules speak for themselves in view of the state of affairs regarding free speech and the exchange of ideas on social media platforms, not to mention science which is far from being settled on the said claims.
Labelling and fact-checking have been the foremost tools of censorship. The fact-checking industry, established more widely in recent years by funds deriving money from several corporate and state players, functions as a reinforcement mechanism for corporate press and Big Tech Covid narratives. Fact-checkers have provided media advocates with legitimacy to claim that opponents of e.g. lockdowns and other NPIs were spreading misinformation. Fact-checking has served as a form of back-door censorship: it appears not to be censoring, but merely blocking false information, formally referring to sheer facts. But fact-checking has been applied almost exclusively to the opponents of official government policy. The official narrative itself and its proponents’ statements are not, in most cases, “fact-checked,” regardless of how little they can be supported by actual facts.
For instance, in autumn 2021, fact-checker Leadstories (contracted by Facebook) decided to fact-check an inquiry into vaccine trial shortfalls published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and labelled it "flawed" and "a hoax alert". The chief editors of BMJ not only declared it inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible, but demanded Facebook CEO in a public letter to immediately remove the "fact-checking" label. Moreover, they also raised a wider concern as the BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s (Facebook) fact-checking regime.
During the whole crisis, several fact-checkers have been insistent on maintaining that natural immunity is inferior to vaccines and labelled related evidence-based claims by scientists, doctors and researchers about the importance of natural immunity as "false" or "misleading". Such labelling has been proven incorrect and not based on previous medical experience nor real scientific research.
As another example, in November 2021 the Netherlands increased the validity of acquired natural immunity regarding Covid, for the so-called Covid certificate, up to 365 days, while their neighbouring Germany did the reverse – decreased the validity of recovery from 180 days to 90 days in January 2022. It is evident that those countries did not follow the same kind of science. Politicizing and exploitation of "science" during Covid health crisis has thus been observed in several instances.
Similarily, fact-checking industry has made regular efforts to declare it false, even as a hypothesis, that Covid-19 virus might have had man-made origins. However, such hypothesis was pronounced by several researchers and experts, e.g. Nobel Prize laureate prof Luc Montagnier (1932-2022), as early as in the spring of 2020. It has been deemed very plausible also by the Chair of the Lancet Covid-19 Committee, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, who has concluded in his work that there is dangerous biotechnology research being kept from public view. Together with prof Neil L. Harrison, Sachs has called for an immediate inquiry into the matter. By now at least two US government agencies have concluded that the coronavirus probably leaked from a lab rather that jumping from animals to humans.
In July 2022, Brownstone Institute published a report on the role of media during Covid-19. Amongst other points the authors stated that instead of seeing themselves as reporters of fact and those who speak truth to power, many media outlets and personalities became self-proclaimed arbiters of truth and ideological “science” activists in the Covid era. The dispensing and enforcement of regime talking points became sacrosanct. Auras of expertise were granted to like-minded individuals – those who appeared to be allied with government policies – while anyone questioning those policies, even when supported by sound research and scientific analysis, was branded not only as illegitimate but also ill-intentioned.
Researchers Yaffa Shir‐Raz, Ety Elisha, Brian Martin, Natti Ronel and Josh Guetzkow have concluded in their 2022 study on the censorship of Covid-19 heterodoxy that when it comes to Covid-related knowledge, the censorship tactics used against dissenters have been extreme and unprecedented in their intensiveness and extensiveness. Scientific journals, academic and medical institutions took an active and involved part in censoring critical voices. Significant role in supressing contrary positions was played by media organizations and especially tech companies. Doctors and researchers with flawless résumés and even with a senior academic or medical status were censored if they dared to express dissenting opinions, and such practice became a common phenomenon.
Prof. Carl Henegan and Dr. Tom Jefferson have pointed out in their analysis that censorship and suppression tactics used by the medical establishment and the media fell into three broad categories described in the abovementioned study: Silencing and Censorship, Denigration and Discrediting of Individuals, and Complaints and Intimidation. A description of the first category is given in the table below.
Effect of pandemic exercises
Several questions should be asked in order to grasp the possible explanation of such coordinated pursuits to censor and cancel as presented above. For instance, what has been the reason of such uniform media support for coercive measures and the suppression of dissenting views from the very start of the crisis? And why has conventional media actively engaged in delegitimizing scientists and doctors by the help of their various tools (fact-checking, labelling, deplatfoming etc), without really addressing the scientific validity of their claims?
One of the answers can perhaps be found at pandemic exercises which have been conducted during the last decade by many international players in several countries, in order to simulate possible scenarios and rehearse them beforehand. The most recent pandemic exercise Event 201 was organized on October 18, 2019 by World Economic Forum, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. That exercise modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic and was carried out a few months prior to the WHO declaring a worldwide coronavirus pandemic. The seventh recommendation stemming from the exercise focused directly on assigning greater priority to developing methods of combatting mis- and disinformation ahead of responding to the next possible pandemic. It states that national public health agencies should work in close collaboration with the WHO in order to create capability to rapidly develop and release consistent health messages:
“Governments and the private sector should assign a greater priority to developing methods to combat mis- and disinformation prior to the next pandemic response. Governments will need to partner with traditional and social media companies to research and develop nimble approaches to countering misinformation. /…/ Media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though the use of technology.”
As part of the abovementioned and previous exercises, suppressing false messages and ensuring that authoritative messages was thus agreed upon and rehearsed beforehand in view of government, corporate and media interests over the course of a possible future pandemic. This might serve to answer those who were surprised by the conformity and the high level of co-ordination between the different players in the field, as to the ways of dealing with information and discourse regarding Covid-19.
Censorship continues
The tendency to censor and cancel has not diminished after the health crisis. This is clear from various legislative initiatives analyzed above, especially in Europe, which have created an urge for gradually restricting more and more speech in public sphere. The whole argument for regulating "misinformation/disinformation" started from the desire to neutralize adversary propaganda (such as China, Russia etc), but it has quickly embraced other spheres of discourse, such as health, climate, migration, minorities etc.
"Content moderation policy" was allegedly one of the reasons why entrepreneur Elon Musk decided to purchase Twitter in the spring of 2022. Twitter had employed hundreds of content-moderation workers to penalize accounts or alter content to combat disinformation or inappropriate content. Musk claimed that certain political interests had been unfairly silenced on the platform and that free speech had been jeopardized as a result of such a policy. The new owner stated that Twitter will move away from issuing permanent bans and allow for “legal free speech” to stay on the platform. Musk has been committed to free speech, regarded it important for Twitter to show two sides of each story and not drive a pre-conceived narrative. He has also advocated for making Twitter algorithms open-sourced, so that they can be critiqued and improved. After concluding his purchase of the Big Tech giant at the end of October 2022, Musk declared that "the bird is freed". In December 2022, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that several mistakes were made in Twitter regarding content moderation and not being resilient to corporate and government control.
In recent years, censorship actions have flared up at most of the big social media platforms. Tech entrepreneur David Sachs, who in October 2022 joined Elon Musk's new Twitter team, has stated that tech behemoths (Google, Facebook, Twitter) are too large and powerful, pose a threat to democracy and free speech, and need to be reined in for the good of America.
In September 2022, a journalist and contributor to Pulitzer prize winning report (2014) Glenn Greenwald warned of a regime of censorship being imposed on the internet, dangerously intensifying in ways that he believes not to be adequately understood. According to him, there is now an entire new industry to pressure Big Tech to censorship. Think tanks and self-proclaimed ‘disinformation experts’ funded by Omidyar, Soros and the U.S./U.K. Security State use benign-sounding names to glorify ideological censorship as neutral expertise. Many new tactics of censoring repression have emerged in the West: Trudeau freezing bank accounts of trucker-protesters, Paypal partnering with ADL to ban dissidents from its financial system, Big Tech platforms openly colluding in unison to de-person people from the internet.
According to Greenwald, the main goal of those curbing free speech is to unite state and corporate power, so as to censor their critics and degrade the internet into an increasingly repressive weapon of information control. This stems from the classic mentality of all would-be tyrants: our enemies are so dangerous, their views so threatening, that everything we do – lying, repression, censorship – is noble. “Our enemies are so evil that anything is justified to stop them.” It is the boiling frog problem: the increase in censorship is gradual but continuous, preventing recognition of how severe it has become.
Doctors under fire
In the field of healthcare, several countries in the West are making efforts to enforce medical professionals and doctors into strictly following the conventional narrative on Covid-19. For instance, as of autumn 2022, California has adopted a law that seeks to punish doctors and possibly suspend their medical licenses for spreading "misinformation" to patients on several key issues, including vaccinations and use of medications. It has been called the most controversial bill to come out of this pandemic. As the First Amendment in the US strongly protects views expressed publicly, the new law applies only to private conversations between patients and their doctors about the former’s care. But the censoring and chilling effect of such a regulation is evident to doctors and even partly recognized by the authorities themselves, as it is curbing well-intentioned conversations between patients and physicians about an infectious disease that is changing from one month to the next. Australia has been similarly seeking initiatives to allow health regulators to have the power to sanction doctors for expressing their professional opinion based on their own assessment of available science.
All of this is happening in the context of an ongoing divergence of views amongst doctors and scientists. As of autumn 2022, for instance Denmark and Norway have stopped offering Covid vaccines for healthy under-50s and under-65s respectively. Sweden announced an end to all vaccine recommendations for 12 to 17-year-olds in autumn 2022. At the same time there are some countries which will still try to inject, even infants, with those same substances. And as a specially grotesque example, the US Federal Government under president Biden has effectively banned entry for unvaccinated visitors and was still upholding this view in March 2023, when for instance world nr 1 tennis player Novak Djokovic was again not permitted to enter the US soil as he was not vaccinated.
It is evident that the notion of "the science" is interpreted and applied in different countries in significantly different manner. Yet in order to avoid threats from health authorities like those in California (USA) or Queensland (Australia) and possibly other places, just one interpretation is allowed for doctors, which is contrary to the core of medical ethics and individual responsibility of those medical professionals.
Conclusion
In 2020–2022, censorship and deplatforming of medical and scientific dissenters have been institutionalized in public and social media which has notably injured the free exchange of ideas and reasonable debate on public health. The subjectivity and arbitrariness of censorship is the reason why the cure is eventually worse than "illness". The best remedy against possible bad speech is more speech, more information, more discourse. Censorship has a deeply characteristic trait of expanding itself in time and gradually embracing more and more space.
As noted by Prof. Jonathan Turley, censorship works in a country much like the coronavirus. Initially you will feel better for silencing the views you consider lies. That is, however, followed by a crash as others will also start demanding more and more censorship, including censhorship against the views you consider to be true. That is precisely what has happened in Europe, where an expanding range of speech is now being criminalized or censored. Yet without uncensored speech, the political system is left gasping for air.