Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed, or flagged the accounts of over 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 misinformation, according to a new study from the Media Research Center.
CensorTrack, an initiative that monitors acts of censorship across online platforms, identified more than 41 instances between March 2020 and February 2022 in which doctors, scientists, and medical organizations were censored, according to the results of a study shared with Daily Caller News Foundation.
The study focused on acts of censorship on major social media platforms and online services, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Ads, and TikTok.
Examples of censorship included Facebook’s decision to flag the British Medical Journal with a "fact check" and "missing context" label, reducing the visibility of a post, for a study delving into data integrity issues with a Pfizer vaccine clinical trial.
Facebook also deleted the page of The Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter led by dozens of medical professionals, including Dr. Jay Battacharya, a Stanford epidemiologist, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former employee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that advocated for less restrictive measures to address the dangers of COVID-19.
Joe Rogan’s interviews with scientists Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone were also censored. Twitter banned Malone from its platform permanently in late December 2021 over the virologist's tweets questioning the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine.
In addition to medical doctors, the study examined instances in which members of Congress were censored by tech platforms.
These included an incident in August 2021 in which YouTube suspended Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul for posting a video arguing that "cloth masks" are not effective against the coronavirus, a view later echoed by many prominent medical commentators. Twitter also flagged a tweet from Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie in which he wrote "studies show those with natural immunity from a prior infection are much less likely to contract and spread COVID than those who only have vaccine induced immunity."
"Big Tech set up a system where you can’t disagree with 'the science' even though that's the foundation of the scientific method," Dan Gainor, MRC vice president of Free Speech America, told the DCNF. "If doctors and academic journals can't debate publicly, then it's not science at all. It's religion."
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