EXPOSED: Censorship and "The COVID Blacklist"
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If you spoke the truth about COVID-19 at any point from 2020 to 2022, there's a good chance big tech companies suspended you for it, for spreading misinformation. Sometimes scientific studies proved you right. Sometimes the social media giants themselves admitted that you were right after the fact. But in almost every case, it didn't matter.

The big tech giants got to decide what you could and could not say about the most far-reaching political issue in American life. In fact, the biggest purveyors of misinformation were the big tech companies themselves. And now that they've been caught, they're trying to memory hole the whole thing. Fortunately, we have the receipts.

On August 28, 2021, Twitter announced that it had permanently suspended former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson from the platform for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules. In the tweet that finally got him booted, Berenson expressed skepticism of the COVID vaccines. Quote, "...it doesn't stop infection," he claimed, "...or transmission."

Don't think of it as a vaccine. Think of it, at best, as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed in advance of illness. And we want to mandate it? Insanity. For that, the reporter was permanently kicked out of the public square. Until he wasn't. On July 6, 2022, Berenson re-emerged on Twitter.

In the intervening 11 months, Berenson had sued Twitter in federal court, claiming that Twitter had violated his First Amendment rights, engaged in false advertising, and violated California's common carrier law. For the first time ever in this sort of suit, Twitter chose to settle out of court, reinstate Berenson's account, and admit that the reporter should not have been suspended at the time for saying what he said.

And the most obvious reason he shouldn't have been banned is that what he said was true. Twitter had even tacitly admitted that what he said was true. Until December 15th, 2021, Twitter's COVID-19 misleading information policy prohibited false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus or symptoms or immunity to unvaccinated people.

But people who had received the vaccine could, and in fact did, spread the virus to plenty of people. Vaccinated, unvaccinated, alike. So, on December 16th, Twitter quietly changed the rule to ban false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the vaccine or symptoms or immunity to unvaccinated people. The COVID vaccines do not stop infection.

or transmission. They never did. But Joe Biden and Dr. Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky all said that they did. You're okay. You're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations. When people are vaccinated, they can feel safe that they are not going to get infected. Vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick. Not a word of it true, but big tech platforms treated it as true.

And they censored countless people, including journalists, including elected politicians, including scientists, who dared to contradict the politically correct narrative of the entrenched powers that be. Now, they want to sweep all that censorship, all that bullying, all that misinformation from the big tech platforms under the rug and hope that we all just forget.

In October of 2020, Twitter locked the account of Scott Atlas, a top science advisor to then-President Donald Trump, for 12 hours over Atlas' claim that face masks didn't actually stop the spread of the coronavirus. Atlas buttressed his claim by citing examples of places with widespread mask enforcement that nonetheless saw COVID cases rising.

YouTube followed suit in August of 2021 when it suspended Rand Paul, not only a U.S. senator but a physician himself, for expressing doubt as to the medical efficacy of cloth face masks.

Senator Paul backed up his skepticism by quoting peer-reviewed articles on the inefficacy of the masks. Senator Paul and Atlas might as well have cited Dr. Fauci himself. Dr. Fauci, who in the early days of the pandemic, when cases were surging, urged Americans not to wear masks. Right now, people should not be walking. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak,

Wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet. But it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. Fauci later came to reverse his position amid political pressure, the very same month. But it turns out Fauci actually had it right the first time.

In a quiet update to its mask policy on January 14, 2022, the CDC finally conceded that the masks, in particular the cloth masks that so many people wore throughout the pandemic, did not provide especially effective protection against the virus.

At the time of Rand Paul's suspension, YouTube prohibited claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19. Today, YouTube no longer even mentions masks in its policy.

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lost his own YouTube channel with its nearly 900,000 subscribers five months after YouTube censored Rand Paul. And for the same reason, mocking the efficacy of the masks. But in the case of Dan Bongino, he didn't just lose access to his channel for a week. He lost it permanently. Now, had Dan uploaded his offending video today, he almost certainly would still have a channel.

since YouTube no longer prohibits calling the masks useless. Since now, everyone agrees the masks are and always were pretty much useless. But because Dan spread that true information at a time that YouTube called it misinformation, months before it stopped calling it misinformation, Dan Bongino is still banned. Back to the Capitol for a second.

Rand Paul is not the only Republican senator suspended by YouTube for spreading so-called misinformation that turned out to be true. In November of 2021, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson received a one-week suspension for citing the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System and discussing vaccine-related injuries and deaths. How can you help them fully recover if you're not willing to admit that vaccine injuries are real?

But Johnson's claim was not only correct, it was also pretty much universally acknowledged to be correct. The risk of vaccine injury and even death, specifically from blood clotting, from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, was so clear that on April 23, 2021, the FDA and CDC recommended a nationwide pause in its distribution.

On May 5, 2022, the FDA considered the clotting risk to be so significant that it banned the shot for children and teenagers and limited its use for people 18 and older only to those who, for whatever reason, were medically ineligible to take one of the other vaccines. Peter Marks, the FDA's vaccines lead and director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, explained:

If we see deaths and there is an alternative vaccine that is not associated with deaths but is associated with similar efficacy, we felt it was time at this point to make a statement on the product's fact sheet that this was not a first-line vaccine.

Beyond the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the journal Science announced in January of 2022 that coronavirus vaccines may cause long COVID-like symptoms, and the risk from the mRNA vaccines of heart problems, myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly in young people, has been well documented and acknowledged by the FDA. In any case, it is now incontrovertible that the vaccines carry risks.

In most cases, YouTube has gotten away with tacitly changing its criteria for censorship of claims about vaccines by lumping it all under the prohibition against claims about COVID-19 vaccinations that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or WHO.

As YouTube perceives that expert consensus to change, it can alter its enforcement policies without ever having to explain why or to acknowledge that it's doing so. But in a couple of cases, YouTube chose to articulate sweeping scientific claims in its guidelines and therefore had to rewrite those guidelines when the scientific rationale for them turned out to be false.

Until May of 2022, YouTube Prohibited claims that COVID-19 vaccines are not effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19. But by May, it had become clear that the vaccines are not in fact effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19, as even the public health authorities had come to admit.

So that month, YouTube quietly and subtly changed the prohibition. Now banning claims that COVID-19 vaccines do not reduce the risk of serious illness or death, a major movement of the goalposts. It was a move in the right direction for people interested in the truth.

But the shift didn't do a lot of good for the countless creators who had seen their videos taken down and their accounts suspended for spreading the truth in violation of YouTube's misinformation policy. The consequences of this censorship campaign cannot be overstated. It didn't just prevent professional content creators from making money or racking up views. It stopped news outlets from reporting the truth.

It stopped public officials from debating public policy. It stopped ordinary Americans from making their voices heard in the political process. The big tech censorship regime, more than perhaps any other factor, reshaped our political order. On August 10th, 2021,

Republican Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene found herself suspended from Twitter for a full week for claiming that "There are too many reports of infection and spread of COVID-19 among vaccinated people. These vaccines are failing and do not reduce the spread of the virus, and neither do masks. Vaccine mandates and passports violate individual freedoms."

That last sentence should not have raised objections from even the most trenchant COVID alarmists. No matter what you think of COVID, it's difficult to argue that mandates don't limit certain freedoms. But the first part turned out to be correct, too. In a self-governing republic, you would imagine that the people's elected representatives would be given the widest degree of latitude possible in the public square.

The COVID pandemic changed that dynamic, as the gatekeepers of the public square frequently gave preferential treatment in discussions of public policy to technocrats and scientists over elected politicians. But even scientists sometimes found themselves on the wrong end of the big tech censors, including, most ironically of all,

one of the people who helped develop the mRNA technology used in the COVID vaccines, Dr. Robert Malone. On January 3rd, 2022, Twitter permanently banned Dr. Robert Malone for repeated violations of its COVID misinformation policy. And what had Dr. Malone said that was allegedly wrong?

He claimed on an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast that natural immunity provides better protection against the virus than the vaccines did. The ban was awkward from the start. One imagines that a man who helped to invent mRNA vaccine technology might know a thing or two more about the vaccines than would the random Twitter censor with the power to ban him.

But things got especially awkward a little over two weeks later, when on January 19th, the CDC admitted that natural immunity had proved stronger than vaccination during the Delta wave of the virus. And not just a little stronger, six times stronger. Twitter never specifically banned claims relating to natural immunity.

preferring instead to lump all of its vaccine censorship under the catch-all prohibition against false or misleading information that misrepresent the protective effect of vaccines. Of course, Dr. Malone's comments on the effectiveness of natural immunity versus vaccines was neither false nor misleading, but Twitter never had to admit its error.

and one of the nation's most knowledgeable voices on mRNA vaccines was booted from the platform. In March of 2021, in response to a question about whether or not people who had recovered from COVID infection needed to vaccinate themselves as well, Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff responded, "No. Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking nobody should."

Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Fortunately, Professor Kulldorff did not have his account permanently taken away from him. Call it Harvard privilege, perhaps. But Twitter did see fit to slap a warning label underneath it. This tweet is misleading. Find out why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.

Of course, the only thing misleading about the post was the warning label, since Dr. Kulldorff's original claim turned out to be correct. And plenty of public health experts and authorities, notably Kulldorff himself, did not recommend a uniform vaccination for everyone. Now, so far, we've been talking a lot about Twitter and YouTube.

But we can't forget about Facebook, which instituted its own COVID speech codes, which were, at times, even more expansive and absurd than those of its peers. In addition to rules about the discussion of masks and vaccines and transmission, Facebook also took a hard line against certain theories about the virus's origin.

In the early days of COVID, news reports and state propaganda blamed the outbreak on a bowl of bad bat soup at a wet market in Wuhan, China. Some rotten pangolin, too, might have played a role, according to those reports. But, we were told...

The outbreak had absolutely nothing to do with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, mainland China's first-ever level 4 bio lab that just so happened to be studying bat coronaviruses. It didn't take long before people connected the dots. However, if they connected those dots on Facebook, they could have had their posts suppressed and their accounts suspended.

In February of 2021, Facebook formally banned suggestions that COVID had leaked from the Wuhan lab from its platform. Facebook was following the official line of the World Health Organization, which in March of that year had reported that the lab leak theory was extremely unlikely. Since the earliest days of the pandemic, China had pressured the WHO to reject any suggestion that the virus had emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But after the WHO's March report, evidence only continued to mount that the virus had something to do with the lab, causing the WHO to reverse its story. There was a premature push to reduce one of the options, like the lab theory. Lab accidents happen. It's common.

Facebook lifted its prohibition, albeit a little bit too late for the people who were shut up for speaking the truth too soon. Facebook banned any post for four months about COVID coming from a lab. Of course, now even the Biden administration is looking into this. Accidents do happen.

But the premature push to promote a single, politically convenient, and often scientifically incoherent narrative about the coronavirus is more than just an accident, a whoopsie-daisy, a no-harm-no-foul. It was a ruthless system of censorship that silenced scientists, journalists, politicians, publishers, and ordinary people

who had the temerity to question the entrenched powers. It was a years-long political scandal that continues to this day as big tech companies attempt to move us along, make us forget the whole thing ever happened. We cannot forget. We cannot allow them to make us forget. And with whatever political power we've still got, whatever political power we may manage to recover,

We cannot let them do it again.

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