Friday 26 July 2024
Content suppression techniques against dissent in the Fifth Estate - examples of COVID-19 censorship on social media
Written for researchers and others interested in the many methods available to suppress dissidents' digital voices. These techniques support contemporary censorship online, posing a digital visibility risk for dissidents challenging orthodox narratives in science.
The Fourth Estate emerged in the eighteenth century as the printing press enabled the rise of an independent press that could help check the power of governments, business, and industry. In similar ways, the internet supports a more independent collectivity of networked individuals, who contribute to a Fifth Estate (Dutton, 2023). This concept acknowledges how a network power shift results from individuals who can search, create, network, collaborate, and leak information in strategic ways. Such affordances can enhance individuals' informational and communicative power vis-à-vis other actors and institutions. A network power shift enables greater democratic accountability, whilst empowering networked agents in their everyday life and work. Digital platforms do enable online content creators to generate and share news that digital publics amplify via networked affordances (such as 💌 likes, " quotes " and sharing via # hashtag communities).
In an ideal world, social media platforms would be considered to be a public accommodation, and the Fifth Estate's users would benefit from legal protection of their original content, including strong measures against unjustified suppression and censorship. The latter should recognise the asymmetric challenges that individual dissenters, whistleblowers and their allies must confront in contradicting hegemonic social forces that can silence their opponents' (digital) voices: As recently evidenced in the COVID-19 "pandemic", the Twitter Files and other investigations, suggest how a conspiracy of multinational pharmaceutical companies, unelected global "health" organisations, national governments, social media and traditional broadcast companies all conspired in silencing dissent versus costly COVID-19 interventions. Any senior scientific expert who questioned this narrative in the Fourth or Fifth Estate was forced to negotiate suppression and censorship for the wrong-think of sharing "dangerous" opinions.
Such sanctions reflect powerful authorities' interests in controlling (scientific) language, the window of permissable opinion, and the social discourses that the public might select from, or add. Under the pretext of public "safety", the censorship industrial complex strong arms the broadcast media and social media companies into restricting dissidents' voices as "misinformation" that is "unsafe". Facing no contest, the views of powerful officialdoms earn frequent repetition within a narrow window for narrative control. At the same legitimate reports of mRNA injuries are falsely redefined to be "malinformation", and censored.
Consequently, instead of a pluralist distribution of power in the Fifth Estate that can support vital expression, powerful authorities are enforcing internet policy interventions that increasingly surveil and censor users' digital voices. Infodemic scholars whose work endorses such suppression would seem to be ignorant of how problematic it is to define disinformation, in general. Particularly in contemporary science, where: knowledge monopolies and research cartels may be dominant; dissent should to be welcomed for great science, and a flawed scientific consensus may be very dangerous. Science-, health communication, and media studies scholars may also ignore the inability of medical experts to accurately define what disinformation is, particularly where decision makers are commercially conflicted.
Censorship, plus other forms of silencing, of legitimate COVID-19 dissent is especially dangerous in being heavily asymmetric: Health authorities already benefit from ongoing capital cascades whose exchange largely serve their interests. Such exchanges span financial, social, cultural, symbolic and even other (e.g. embodied) forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1986:2018). By contrast, individual critics can quickly be silenced by attacks on their limited capital, effectively preventing them from exercising rights to free speech and sustained critique. Silencing such dissent has important public health ramifications, particularly where the potential for suggesting, and exploring, better public health interventions is shut down.
Another concern is that the censorial actions of artificial intelligence designers and digital platform moderators are often opaque to a platforms' users. Original content creators may be unaware that they will be de-amplified for sharing unorthodox views, as algorithms penalise the visibility of content on 'banned' lists, and any accounts that amplify "wrongthink". This post seeks to flag the wide variety of techniques that can be used in the Fifth Estate to suppress and censor. Each censorship/suppression technique is ordered within categories- (i) content, then (ii) accounts, (iii) practices against supportive publics, and (iv) for public anger. This post focuses on (i) and lists a category's techniques in order with increasingly severe techniques:
#1 Covering up algorithmic manipulation
Social media users who are not aware about censorship are unlikely to be upset about it (Jansen & Martin, 2015). Social media platforms have not been transparent about how they manipulated their recommender algorithms to provide higher visibility for the official COVID-19 narrative, or in crowding out original contributions from dissenters on social media timelines, and in search results. Such boosting ensured that dissent was seldom seen, or perceived as fringe minority's concern. As Dr Robert Malone tweeted, the computational algorithm-based method now 'supports the objectives of a Large Pharma- captured and politicised global public health enterprise'. Social media algorithms have come to serve a medical propaganda purpose that crafts and guides the 'public perception of scientific truths'. While algorithmic manipulation underpins most of the techniques listed below, it is concealed from social media platform users.
#2 Fact choke versus counter-narratives
A fact choke involves burying unfavourable commentary amongst a myriad of content. This term was coined by Margaret Anna Alice to describe how "fact checking" was abused to suppress legitimate dissent.
An example she tweeted about was the BBC's Trusted New Initiative warning in 2019 about anti-vaxxers gaining traction across the internet, requiring algorithmic intervention to neutralise "anti-vaccine" content. In response, social media platforms were urged to flood users' screens with repetitive pro-(genetic)-vaccine messages normalising these experimental treatments. Simultaneously, messaging attacked alternate treatments that posed a threat to the vaccine agenda. Fact chokes also included 'warning screens' that were displayed before users could click on content flagged by "fact checkers" as "misinformation". With the "unvaccinated" demonised by the mainstream media to create division, susceptible audiences were nudged to become vaccine compliant to confirm their compassionate virtue. At the same time to retain belief in mRNA genetic vaccine "safety", personal accounts, aggregated reports (such as "died suddenly" on markcrispinmiller.substack.com) and statistical reports (see Cause Unknown) for genetic vaccine injuries became suppressed as "malinformation" despite their factual accuracy. Other "controversial content", such as medical professionals' criticism of dangerous COVID-19 treatment protocols (see What the Nurses Saw) or criticism of a social media platform's policies (such as application of lifetime bans and critiques of platform speech codes) have been algorithmically suppressed.
An example she tweeted about was the BBC's Trusted New Initiative warning in 2019 about anti-vaxxers gaining traction across the internet, requiring algorithmic intervention to neutralise "anti-vaccine" content. In response, social media platforms were urged to flood users' screens with repetitive pro-(genetic)-vaccine messages normalising these experimental treatments. Simultaneously, messaging attacked alternate treatments that posed a threat to the vaccine agenda. Fact chokes also included 'warning screens' that were displayed before users could click on content flagged by "fact checkers" as "misinformation". With the "unvaccinated" demonised by the mainstream media to create division, susceptible audiences were nudged to become vaccine compliant to confirm their compassionate virtue. At the same time to retain belief in mRNA genetic vaccine "safety", personal accounts, aggregated reports (such as "died suddenly" on markcrispinmiller.substack.com) and statistical reports (see Cause Unknown) for genetic vaccine injuries became suppressed as "malinformation" despite their factual accuracy. Other "controversial content", such as medical professionals' criticism of dangerous COVID-19 treatment protocols (see What the Nurses Saw) or criticism of a social media platform's policies (such as application of lifetime bans and critiques of platform speech codes) have been algorithmically suppressed.
#3 Title-jacking
For the rare dissenting content that can achieve high viewership, another challenge is that title-jackers will leverage this popularity for very different outputs under exactly the same (or very similar) production titles. This makes it less easy for new viewers to find the original work. For example, Liz Crokin's 'Out of the shadows’ documentary describes how Hollywood and the mainstream media manipulate audiences with propaganda. Since this documentary's release, several videos were published with the same title.
#4 Blacklisting trending dissent
Social media search engines typically allow their users to see what is currently the most popular content. In Twitter, dissenting hashtags and keywords that proved popular enough to feature amongst trending content, were quickly added to a 'trend blacklist' that hid unorthodox viewpoints. Tweets posted by accounts on this blacklist are prevented from trending regardless of how many likes or retweets they receive. On Twitter, Stanford Health Policy professor Jay Bhattacharya argues he was added to this blacklist for tweeting on a focused alternative to the indiscriminate COVID-19 lockdowns that many governments followed. In particular, The Great Barrington Declaration he wrote with Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, which attracted over 940,000 supporting signatures. After its publication, all three authors experienced censorship on search engines (Google deboosted results for the declaration), social media platforms (Facebook temporarily removed the declaration's page, while Reddit removed links to its discussion) and on video (Youtube removed a roundtable discussion with Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis whose participants questioned the efficacy and appropriateness of requiring children to wear face masks).#5 Blacklisting content for interactions from dodgy accounts
Limited visibility filtering also occurs when comments are automatically commented on by pornbots, or feature engagement by other undesirable accounts. For example, posts mentioning the keywords/subjects such as 'vaccine, Pfizer' may receive automated forms of engagement, which then sees posts receiving such "controversial" engagement becoming added to a list ensuring these posts censorship (see 32 mins into Alex Kriel's talk on the 'The Role of Fake Bot Traffic on Twitter/X'.
#6 Making content unlikeable and unsharable
This newsletter from Dr Steven Kirsch's (29.05.2024) described how a Rasmussen Reports video on YouTube had its 'like' button removed. As Figure 1 shows, users could only select a 'dislike' option. This button was restored for www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS_CapegoBA.
Social media platforms may also prevent resharing such content, or prohibit links to external websites that are not supported by these platforms' backends, or have been flagged for featuring inappropriate content.
#7 Making content unsearchable within, and across, digital platforms
Social media companies applied search blacklists to prevent their users from finding blacklisted content. Content contravening COVID-19 "misinformation" policies was hidden from search users. For example, Twitter applied a COVID-19 misleading information policy that ended in November, 2022. In June 20023, META began to end its policy for curbing the spread of "misinformation" related to COVID-19 on Facebook and Instagram.
#8 Content takedowns
Social media companies could ask users to take down content that was in breach of COVID-19 "misinformation" policies, or automatically remove such content without its creators' consent. In 2021, META reported that it had removed more than 12 million pieces of content on COVID-19 and vaccines that global health experts had flagged as misinformation. YouTube has a medical misinformation policy that follows the World Health Organisation (WHO) and local health authorities guidance. In June 2021, YouTube removed a podcast in which the evidence of a reproductive hazard of mRNA shots was discussed between Dr Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch on Prof Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse channel. Teaching material that critiqued genetic vaccine efficacy data was automatically removed within seconds for going against its guidelines (see Shir Raz, Elisha, Martin, Ronnel, Guetzkow, 2022). The WHO reports that its guidance contributed to 850,000 videos related to harmful or misleading COVID-19 misinformation being removed from YouTube between February 2020 and January 2021.#9 Deception conceals the motives behind censorship, and who its real promoters may be
Social media platforms not only hide algorithmic suppression from users, but may also be misused to hide from users the full rationale for censorship, or who is ultimately behind it. Professor David Hughes prepared a glossary of deceptive terms and their true meanings (2024, pp 194-195) to highlight how the meaning of words is damaged by propaganda. A term resonating with technique #9 is “Critical” - pretending to speak truth to power whilst turning a blind eye to deep state power structures. The official narrative positioned COVID-19 as a (i) pandemic that had zoonotic (animal-to-human) origins, and alternate explanations were strongly suppressed. However, rival hypotheses do merit investigation, particularly if they can be proven to be more plausible. SARS-COV-2 might have stemmed from (ii) an outbreak at the Wuhan Lab's "gain of function" research, or a (iii) deliberate release in several countries from a biological weapons research project? Some critics even dispute the existence of SARS-COV-2, alleging that (iv) viral transmission is unproven, and that the entire COVID-19 "pandemic" is a psychological propaganda operation. By silencing such views, social media platforms limit their users' access to important debates, whilst weaponising deception in the interests of powerful groups.
N.B. This post is a work-in-progress and the list above is not exhaustive- kindly comment to recommend techniques that should be added, and suggestions for salient examples are most welcome.
Monday 8 January 2024
Presentation notes for Cybermobs for online academic bullying - a new censorship option to protect The Science™ ’s status-quo
Written for viewers of the Slideshare presentation.
Here is the transcript of the talk that accompanied https://www.slideshare.net/TravisNoakes/cybermobs-for-online-academic-bullying-2023pptx. For more on its background, click here.
Slide #1
Thanks for the joining this talk on how academic cybermobs can serve as a new censorship option for protecting scientific orthodoxy. Mobs that seek to silence dissenters are a small part of a much greater concern regarding the censorship of legitimate disagreement… and scientific truths online.
#2
You can all read faster than I can speak, so please do for this organizer of my presentation. After introducing yours truly and The Noakes Foundation (TNF), I am going to define the key concepts of The Science, scientific suppression, undone science, digital voice and online censorship
#3
And how digital voice in the Fifth Estate is useful for working around scientific suppression, changing science and guidelines. Dissidents who succeed in gaining public attention can face hard and soft forms of censorship, which include the distinctive actions of an academic cybermobs, plus facing as a myriad of forms of censorship on digital platforms. The talk closes with the challenges of researching academic cybermobs and a brief intro into celebrity cybermobbing research that TNF assists.
#4
My doctorate was in Media Studies and my research is qualitative and highly interdisciplinary. It spans the fields of culture, digital media, education and the health sciences. A common thread is exploring how individual’s communicative agency relates to social structure. I am an Adjunct Scholar at CPUT, whilst also volunteering at The Noakes Foundation (TNF) for its brand development as evidenced via its new website, plus you’ll see emoji sticker designs from my Create With business in this presentation too.
#5
TNF largely supports research into low-carbohydrate lifestyles as Big Food and Big Pharma generally don’t. I lead TNF’s Academic Free Speech and Digital Voices research project to explore how dissident researchers use digital voice for promoting their research, whilst negotiating scientific suppression and censorship from supporters of The (Current) Science™. The Science™️ is a phenomenon in Higher Education whereby tenured staff must defend the correct science of their time, arguing against alternate explanations. It has a religious overtone, as orthodox scientists strive to protect their life-long contribution of “correct beliefs” against questioning from heretical outsiders. Measures to protect The Science™️’s body of knowledge can include suppression and even “legitimate” censorship of “harmful” counter-opinions and interpretations. The Science™️ is unscientific as it does not encourage dissent’s radically different interpretations of the data.
#6
It’s important to recognise that scientific censorship of differing opinions may only be a last-resort, because the formal assimilation of what is considered prestigious research is so powerful. Therefor before my presentation tackles academic cybermobs, the ‘safe’, incremental knowledge that Higher Education’s funders and leadership support must be critiqued: In media, a few powerful social agents can effectively control research capacity by only funding research directions that serve their business interests. At the same time, false ethical concerns can be used to delimit what’s good to research in a field. TNF’s research beneficiaries have plenty of experience with submitting research proposals that are repeatedly blocked because of dogma that “Eating fat is harmful”, so participants who are urged to do so (and eat less “healthy” sugar in highly processed foods) WILL BE harmed. Ethical compliance in academia can serve unethical ends in slowing, if not preventing, competition between paradigms. Another concern is that conflicts of interest in supporting the silent long-term interests of third-party funders are often undisclosed. Mr Bill Gates is much wealthier now that when he promised to give away his fortune… In part, thanks to the BMGF’s philanthropic support for genetic vaccine research and Mr Gates’ investments in the companies that sell this product. At worst, academic research can be likened to a buyer’s market for real-estate in which the funders as buyers strongly dictate the agenda. In the Health Sciences, huge competition exists between many researchers keen to secure scarce funding from the few large funders who might provide it.
#7
Such public critical reflection on how funders impact academic freedom is disincentivized as career-limiting for most academics. For PANDA, TNF and any research beneficiary, Bourdieusian epistemic reflexivity can provides a vital tool to interrogate their scientific interrogation. The concept of reflexivity helps to spotlight how scholars make judgements of which research problems to focus on and what gets excluded… Perhaps a dominant paradigm can be identified that is a restrictive gatekeeper to new challengers, or a relativist ‘anything goes’ approach is missing the woods for the trees? Pierre Bourdieu’s relational critique helps us fit how our and other scholars’ interpretations link not just to disciplinary fields as agents, but are structured in relation to broader, dynamic social patterns and causalities.
#8
For example the sociology of scientific knowledge helps us understand why economic capital is foundation to developing the other academic capitals shown here. Economic capital from donors (or long-term knowledge investors like Mr Gates) not only support the fieldwork, outputs, academic relationships and prestige in different types of capital exchange within the Higher Educaton field, but contribute to the ongoing development of academic fields and what’s considered legitimate and most valuable in them. Likewise, what is neglected or ignored as shown in the example on the right. That may range from low-cost COVID-19 treatments… to the related deprioritisation of other major health concerns, such as HIV, TB and Malaria in Africa, as described by Dr David Bell. Capital exchange also helps situate whether symbolic recognition for research is high (such for mRNA innovation), low or non-existent.
#9
Clearly, a complex inter-relationship of extant (and future) capitals is at work in Higher Education (HE) relationships. They typically underpin a “safety first” knowledge landscape where the ideas on the right are endorsed as unquestionably “beneficial”. It is in the interest of The Science™’s business funders to maintain such a beneficient impression with HE experts serving as a bulwark of talking heads versus “science deniers”. The Science™ favors an absence of scientific controversy in HE. This absence suggests universal, expert consensus, and that there is no no need to consider new explanations as the truth is settled. Where debates do occur, Scientific Controversy research methods {such as Venturini and Munk’s ‘Controversy Mapping’ (2022)} can be applied. These help scholars frame the actors, their networks and alliances, plus the debates themselves. However, an economic focus on how capacity for which viewpoints receive funding and develop the strongest capacity would seem the most useful avenue for a sociology of scientific knowledge to develop an holistic picture for what scientific explanations are routinely supported in Higher Education… Conversely, which promising ones receive no support (or are incapacitated) as Undone Science... These evidence potential areas of scientific suppression.
#10
There is important research that could be done, but is not encouraged by the dominant orthodoxy of The Science™. Undone Science exists where research projects’ potential findings may be counter to The Science™’s funders publicity and other interests. For example, international health organisations are unlikely to fund communication studies into how the guidelines they endorsed and paid to amplify caused harms that outweighed overstated risks and inflated benefits. Similarly, multinational genetic vaccine manufacturers will not fund research regarding personal responsibility and low-cost treatments… Related findings may pose an existential threat to Big Pharma’s businesses- especially those that profits from experimental drugs being mandated and tested on so-called “patients” at their own risk.#11
In contrast to ‘undone science’, scientific suppression speaks to impedance of research that is unfair, unjust and counter to academic standards of behaviour. In theory, academics should enjoy the right to context the prescribed orthodoxy in their academic work and lives. This right seeks to protect academics from the vested interests of other parties, giving those who’ve earned the right an opportunity to speak their truth. It’s a foundational right that should support scholars with advancing and expanding knowledge, for example by accommodating diverse voices. Without strong support for this right, scientific autonomy is unsustainable where funders’ and administrators’ needs subsume any independent scholarship.
#12
True scientific autonomy poses a risk to the powerful, especially where its findings suggest an improved, alternative way of doing things (such as eating low-carb diets for controlling diabetes, versus solely injecting Insulin meds daily). So, in our contemporary marketized universities, which increasingly rely on corporate funding, the on-the-ground financial realities of pleasing long-term funders will contradict the ideals of autonomy, objectivity and free speech. Powerful internal and external groups do not support building capacity for risky research or controversial debates that might upset powerful funders. Rather they fund incrementalistic research in support of more-of-the-same. ‘Revolutionary technology’ mRNA products simply boost Big Pharma’s existing business models. Embedded academics are keen to create debates on the importance of mandatory vaccination, rather than whether the mRNA platform is sufficiently tested to merit being termed a ‘vaccine’. Aware that there is no equal treatment or due process, especially for dissidents with a public following, skeptics protect their reputations and career trajectories by self-censoring, avoiding the time-drain of debating The Science™’s truth. If academics or students have challenging conversations, these may be policed for “wrongthink” leading to career cancelation, especially if their pursuit of objective scientific truth conflicts with the “current thing”. A university may promote “safe spaces”, but these seldom include research into controversial ideas that must confront complex ethical challenges.
#13
The market university is just one site of knowledge production in which social groups try to dominate the development of educational knowledge. Professor Henry Kwok et al. argues that the global health crisis of COVID-19 presents…a fertile ground for exploring the complex division of knowledge labour in a ‘post-truth’ era. In contrast to post-truth which has many definitions and a broad conceptualisation, knowledge production is positioned as a narrow concept well suited for exploring the social conditions of knowledge. This slide’s example shows three ‘fields’ under Rules- Each transformation of knowledge takes place in a particular field (see Table 1), within which different expert agents work. Discourse is produced in HE by a range of agents; A process of Pedagogisation then occurs in which specialist medical knowledge that is inaccessible to the public is recontextualized. Knowledge becomes translated into novel forms that non-specialist audiences might access and understand more readily. What counts as ‘valid’ knowledge and practice in the division of knowledge labour is determined by evaluative rules. Here government officials decide how COVID-19 policy should impact the public in response to guidance from experts. This analysis clarifies that researchers should explore the relations between and within each division’s fields. Such analysis reveals areas of contradiction and conflict between fields, and even agents within them.
#14
Contradictions occur between agents and agencies with different interests, which are directed by and reflected in their divergent goals. An analysis of these contradictions is helpful for broadening our understanding of where ‘post-truth’ moments lie… In this example for the WHO’s infodemic research agenda, it can illustrate examples of disinformation that the WHO’s infodemic research agenda might miss or neglect. As Dr David Bell, my father and I wrote, the WHO leads the infodemic research agenda and positions itself and its international health organisation partners to be evaluators of what “misinformation” is. This has the potential to create an intragroup contradiction, when infodemic scholars at universities research the WHO’s decisions but learn that these and related guidance have shifted dramatically, sometimes with no clear justification!
#15
For example, Abir Balan’s work here lists the key guidelines provided by the WHO for ‘mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza’. However, a cursory glance shows that the public health measures applied in 2019 would be radically altered just months later. Scholars who are dependent on research funding from the WHO (or those whose funding sustains it, such as BMGF) would seem unlikely to criticise such sudden and unexplained shifts in guidance.
#16
Conventional division of knowledge labour diagrams place the tertiary academic field as the leader of discourse production. By contrast, the division for mRNA vaccine research (see Table 3) highlights how companies manufacturing vaccines drive contemporary research and the distributive rules in knowledge labour. Only wealthy pharmaceutical companies have the financial and other resources to drive mRNA research at scale and at warp speed. This of course creates a massive conflict of interest because whether the company producing these therapies will ultimately benefit financially from the future sales of these therapies depends entirely on the published efficacy and safety results from their own research! Another contradiction exists between the deliberation and recontextualisation fields, where vaccine-manufacturing pharmaceutical companies can use their large online advertising budgets to influence content on digital platforms and fact-checking. For example, dissident health professionals and academic scholars who promoted personal responsibility faced censorship, not just on campus and by medical authorities, but also on the most popular social media platforms (such as Facebook and Twitter).
#17
Such censorship of digital platforms is an important concern, since social media platforms have enabled dissident experts to network their expertise and launch conventional science projects that evolved from anecdotes into published research. As Holmberg’s scholarship shows, online low carb high fat diet advocacy was very important for contesting the flawed nutritional guidelines of the National Swedish Food Agency. This raised political awareness around low carb diets and provided vital opportunities to contest the nutritional authorities with academic research that helped to change Sweden’s nutritional guidelines.
#18
Professor William H Dutton argues in his recent The Fifth Estate book that social media platforms now form part of a Fifth Estate. In a recent email to the Association of Internet Researchers he describes how his book ‘makes a case for the internet and related media and communication technologies enabling the most important power shift of the digital age. A network power shift has been driven by enabling ordinary people to search, originate, network, collaborate, and leak information in ways than enhance their informational and communicative power. In such ways, the internet is empowering many ordinary individuals to form a more independent collectivity of networked individuals—a Fifth Estate. This network power shift enables greater democratic accountability, whilst empowering networked individuals in their everyday life and work. Suggesting these platforms importance in how digital content creators generate and share news that digital publics amplify via networked affordances.'
#19
Professor Holmberg is one of very few scholars who have written how dissident scientists have successfully exercised digital voice to change both science and government guidelines. There is a large research gap concerning empirical research into scientific censorship. We do know that it has two forms: hard and soft. Authorities try to prevent dissemination with the former… or pressurize dissidents with threats of reputational damage and exclusion from their fields of knowledge production. With dissenters’ digital voices emerging as as potent force for creating social movements via the powerful Fifth Estate
authorities’ desires to exercise censorship via Big Tech’s social media platforms is an emergent reality.
#20
Naim and Bennett (2014) proposed this 21st century censorship matrix for government influence on the production and dissemination of information and opinion. Such censorship can be obvious, in being direct and visible. In contrast, it may be hard to sport as stealthy and/or indirect.
#21
This is a similar matrix for what has been evidenced against low-carb scholars, from Australasia to South Africa, the USA onto Scandinavia. Various roleplayers aim to prevent research and teaching into the insulin resistance model inside Academia, and to create the perception amongst online audiences that the science behind LCHF is illegitimate, unscientific and promoted by self-serving charlatans.
#22
Senior scientific dissidents with a public following will be a lightning rod for such attacks, since their position highlights that the science is not settled. My father, Emeritus Professor Noakes, has made this major contribution to his institutional employer over a long academic career. He shifted to a low carb, or Banting lifestyle in 2011 and shared the benefits of a low-carb lifestyle which supported the reversal of diabetes.
#23
Heavily processed, Big Food industries and insulin-pushing Big Pharma businesses want to limit the public’s attention to low-carb science as it threatens their profits. Such powerful companies can support these strategies for breaking the causal chain between Prof Noakes’ information dissemination and individuals’ willingness to act. In Prof Noakes’ case, they could support critics who sought to delegitimate his research journal publications and books he wrote on low carb; pseudo-skeptics questioned his credibility and that of "Tim Hoax"’s associates in a myriad of publications. Their attacks could involve many forms of cyber harassment.
#24
Daniel Citron’s excellent book, ‘Hate Crimes in Cyberspace’, provides this common definition for harassment on page 124- ‘Harassment is typically understood as a willful and malicious ‘course of conduct’ directed at a person that would cause a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress and that does cause the person to suffer distress.’
#25
The term ‘cyber harassment’ is necessary, as Citron points out, for describing how the reach and pervasiveness of the internet can exacerbate the injuries that targets suffer; In cyber harassment, there is an interesting paradox between how the texts, images, sounds and videos shared by cyber harassers seem banal and trivial BUT the impact of this content can actually threaten families, careers and lives! Repeated privacy invasions, threats of violence and attacks on a target’s reputation may sabotage their professional and family lives, future opportunities…and even lead to suicide or its recipient “going postal”.
#26
Fortunately, Professor Noakes is very tough and has survived nearly a decade of such cyber harassment with such experiences shared in this partially pseudonymized case.
#27
There are many activities that the perpetrators of cyber harassment can follow… All should be regarded seriously as they can result in emotional, physical and professional harm to their targets. Using Tim’s example, I’ll talk through two threats that you may be unfamiliar with: The first is ‘Google bombing’ in which a search engine page is gamed to elevate the rankings of negative and destructive pages… in this case, if you search for Prof’s ‘Lore of Nutrition’ book, but what first appears is a biased, negative review from a pediatrician… versus the many positive reviews that this book earned. A technical explanation for this high-ranking of the review is certainly not its quality… rather that it is cited on Wikipedia, which Google deems a credible source. The second threat are “digital pariah” profiles created by Wikipedia’s and Rationalwiki’s editors’ choices. Such “crowdsourced” profiles are strongly shaped by an anti-dissident editorial bias. Remember that when next you are asked to donate by the “independent” Wikipedia.
#28
Digital pariah profiles and Google Bombs are digital extensions of academic workplace mobbing techniques. Academic mobbing seeks to eject scholars from academia, involving aggressive techniques for ostracization. Recontextualising an A1 rated scientist’s career and books as flawed are clearly an example of this. Unlike organic trolling from complete strangers, colleagues in an academic cybermob can launch concerted attacks. This makes academic cybermobbing a distinct, emergent threat.
#29
Dissidents voicing pro Insulin Resistance model and offering low carbohydrate advice communicate in diverse issue arenas, ranging from the model’s science to the lifestyle’s impact on agriculture. These are PR areas that corporations, institutions and their employees have high stakes in. Dissidents may attract direct and indirect criticism from any of these agents concerned about such issues.
#30
What was notable in Prof Noakes’ case was the vast number of South African and International bodies who had stakes in challenging his opinions. Health organisations and academic institutions may also become involved in correspondence.
#31
The criticisms from work colleagues here would seem unethical and unacceptable in most workplaces. They also create a problem for the recipient in how to respond appropriately to such criticism with no germane successful examples to follow. Here we see the types of slurs used on Twitter and elsewhere that hypercritical interlocutors used in arguing that Professor Tim Noakes had morphed into a dangerous “anti-science” hack.
#32
Academic cybermobbing differs from workplace mobbing which is defined as an embodied covert process inside a university employee’s faculty’s department. Here are 16 key points covering the ways in which academic cybermobbing can be worse. In particular, the network of attacking groups and individuals is often visible, making it easy to jump on the bandwagon. Sensationalist criticism is encouraged by digital platform algorithms that reward controversy with attention - cyber mobs drive circles of outrage that contribute to spiraling cyber harassment. A dissident can easily exhaust him or herself trying to respond to many phases of criticism from different groups on many platforms across different timezones. And there may well be no institutional recourse against colleagues whose freedom of speech ironically undermines the aforesaid for dissidents. Overall there is complete asymmetry between a dissident’s capabilities to respond, and critics myriad of opportunities for attack.
#33
The agents in an academic cybermobbing can also differ to those in academic mobbing, While the latter will have private orchestrators and supporters who are all academics in a shared field, an academic cybermobbing can involve recontexualisers from other fields. For example, public criticism from trolls keen to syphon off a dissident’s public views. As a public spectacle, it is also concerning for dissidents when their colleagues simply act as witnesses and bystanders to cyber harassment.
#34
Participating in criticism of dissidents can also be used for capital exchange. Pseudo-skeptics can gain hypervisibility as thought leaders, that they cannot achieve without holding PhDs and making real contributions to academia. Likewise, reaping symbolic capital in terms of the numbers of followers they attract. Dogmatists can earn social capital bridging them with to new groups, plus their defence of the orthodoxy may reap rewards ranging from content payments to securing better academic positions.
#35
While I use negative terms such as dogmatist and pseudo-skeptic, it is important to keep in mind that the academic defenders of The Science™ do readily justify their censorship activities as well-meaning, benevolent for their peers and the public, and pro-social overall for human wellbeing.
#36
Overt censorship tactics are not only applied by platforms, but can be requested and applied by defenders of the Science™ in certain instances. For example, mobs can launch matrix attacks for deplatforming their targets. Dissidents can be reported for being in breach of platform safety… such as Twitter’s pre-Musk COVID-19 communication policy.
#37
Digital platforms have many covert censorship mechanisms that can be used for stifling free speech. Around 24 of them are listed on this slide and the next…
#38
While academic cybermobs may not be responsible for such tactics, they certainly may take actions to promote systematic censorship against the misinformation from dissidents to prevent its assumed harms. This itself may have a serious harm in serving as scientific censorship that will suppress accurate information, such as supporting a fake consensus for dysfunctional interventions.
#39
It is hard to research such censorship and there are many obstacles to researching academic cybermobs even if you can find scarce funding. These include: there not being a strong rationale or examples one can follow. One must access data under highly restrictive research user agreements. There can be much missing data (cyber harassment from private, deleted or banned accounts is not provided via APIs). Data is provided in structures that can make it hard to track key analytical foci (e.g. conversation threads on X (healthy conversations). There are challenges in cleaning the data and representing the original users’ experience (spreadsheet data vs multimodal tweets). There are also important ethical challenges in researching colleagues’ anti-social activities and producing research outputs from them!
#40
One challenging, but less ethically difficult proposition is to explore the activity of cybermobs outside academia. For example, The Noakes Foundation, Younglings Africa and the SMILR lab support PhD candidate Pinky Motshware with studying celebrity cybermobs. Their attacks led to life changing outcomes for local black male celebrities, which Pinky is preparing case studies for.
#41
Thank you for your attention and continued support.
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