Written for health science communication researchers concerned with genetic vaccination promotion being non-consensual and a form of propaganda.

Since June 2023, Dr Piers Robinson, myself and Dr David Bell have submitted the titular manuscript to nine journals with no strong reviews, and many desk rejects without solid explanation. This is despite our journal search from 2024 focusing on seemingly suitable journals that met the criteria of tackling (i) health communication, (ii) propaganda, and (iii) previously having shared controversial articles questioning the official COVID-19 narrative. Since we cannot identify any viable new targets, we have decided to share our manuscript as a pre-print on SSRN and ResearchGate. We hope that readers there can at least offer solid, constructive criticism of our work.

As scholars know, every journal submission can take many hours for preparing the related documentation, plus formatting the manuscript to a journal's stylistic specifications, etc. To compensate for such lengthy academic labour, authors might reasonably expect that editorial teams will be highly ethical in providing detailed reasoning behind desk-rejections. Where there is a strong pattern of such feedback being absent, or poor, on controversial topics, dissident authors may justifiably perceive that they are negotiating an academic journal publication firewall. Why would editors be reluctant to go on record for their reasons for desk-rejection, if they are indisputable? Even when editorial staff's feedback is highly critical, this is still constructive for authors. They can then completely revise their manuscript for submission to new journals. Or perhaps save time, by confronting the reality that their manuscript's non- or weak-contribution means it must be abandoned!

Our frustration with not receiving constructive criticism is similar to accounts from many other dissenters against the official COVID-19 narrative. Notably, Professors Bhattacharya and Hanke (2023) documented dissidents’ censorship experiences via popular pre-print options. And Professor Norman Fenton (in Fighting Goliath, 2024) and Dr Robert Malone (in PsyWar, 2024) provide compelling accounts of shifting from being welcome journal authors and conference speakers, to unpublishable for any manuscript critical of COVID-19 statistics or treatment policies. Such experts would seem unlikely to have produced fallacious research unsuited to peer review given their high levels of expertise, plus long publication records.

Our wannabe-journal article tackles an important, albeit controversial, question, How might pharma- or medical propaganda be distinguished from health communication? South Africa's (SA) case of COVID-19 genetic vaccine promotion is described for how incentivization, coercion and deceptive messaging approximated to a non-consensual approach- preventing informed consent for pregnant women. In terms of generalisability, this case study can be described as a hard case- given the status of pregnant women as perhaps the most vulnerable and protected category in society, one expects health communicators to be extremely cautious about adopting non-consensual methods of persuasion. We show that this was indeed the case in South Africa, making it more likely that such tactics were used for other less vulnerable groups.

In desk rejecting our work, editors and reviewers may well have thought that evaluating persuasive communication in terms of whether or not it is deceptive and non-consensual is not, in some sense, a legitimate research question. In stark contrast, as Dr Piers Robinson argues (at the end of this Linked thread), our research question is indeed, 'an essential part of evaluating whether any given persuasion campaign can be said to meet appropriate ethical/democratic standards. With the attention to fake news and disinformation, there is in fact much in the way of scholarly attention to questions of deceptive or manipulative communication. So we are not asking a question that is not asked by many others and across a wide range of issue areas. And we utilised a conceptual framework developed and published elsewhere.'

Another concern may be that our manuscript it "biased" to 'reach a predetermined outcome'. This ignores the possibility that our work could have found no evidence of deceptive communication, and none for incentivization. However, the evidence presented does strongly support a major concern that pregnant women were incentivised, deceived and coerced into taking (poorly-tested) genetic vaccines (whose side-effects are also poorly tracked). In the absence of detailed editor rejection feedback, it's hard for us to improve our argument for a hoped-for peer review that's fair.

It's also important to acknowledge the context in which our paper was written, which is of considerable scientific concern over the COVID-19 event. Notably, rushed guidance based on weak evidence from international health organisations could well have perpetuated negative health and other societal outcomes, rather than ameliorating them (Noakes, Bell & Noakes, 2022). In particular, health authorities rushed approval of genetic vaccines as the primary response, and their "health promotion" seems a ripe target for robust critique. Particularly when successful early treatments were widely reported to have been suppressed so that Emergency Use Authorisation for genetic vaccines could be granted (Kennedy, 2021).

An unworthy topic?

Our negative experience of repeated, poorly (or un-) explained rejections would seem to suggest that presenting South Africa's case of COVID-19 genetic vaccine promotion as pharmaceutical/medical propaganda was not worthy of academic journals' review- even for those promising to tackle scientific controversies and challenging topics.

Not unexpectedly, SSRN removed our pre-print after a week, providing the following email rationale: 'Given the need to be cautious about posting medical content, SSRN is selective on the papers we post. Your paper has not been accepted for posting on SSRN.' So, no critique of the paper's facts or methods, just rapid removal of our COVID 19 "health communication" critique. In SSRN 's defence, its website's FAQs do flag that 'Medical or health care preprints at SSRN are designed for the rapid, early dissemination of research findings; therefore, in most instances, we do not post reviews or opinion-led pieces, as well as editorials and perspectives.' So perhaps the latter concern was indeed the most significant factor in SSRN's decision... But with no explicit/specific explanation for its rationale for its decision, it's also possible that our critique of COVID-19 "health science communication" weighed more heavily as a factor by human decision makers. Alternately, an Artificial Intelligence agent wrote the rejection email, triggered by our sensitive keywords. COVID-19 + proganda = (a must reject routine.)

The inspiration for our original manuscript

The original paper was drafted for a special issue of the Transdisciplinary Research Journal of Southern Africa. It focuses on ‘Efficacy in health science communication in a post-pandemic age: Implications for Southern Africa’.  In a small way, our review article was inspired as a critique of two assumptions in the call for the special issue's opening paragraph: (1) 'Much of the broad population and indeed more of the intelligentsia than one would imagine arguably remain to a greater or lesser degree sceptical of science' and (2) 'widespread suspicion of the origin of the virus seemingly fuelled by conspiracy theories, and of surprising levels of vaccine hesitancy voiced in a range of guises.' 

In the first place, there is a different between science, and following The Science™ from a transglobal vaccine cartel. Individuals or groups did have sound scientific grounds to reject genetic vaccination. Indeed, individuals with PhDs were most likely to reject being "vaccinated" with a rushed and poorly-tested product. Secondly, the theory that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan lab is not a "conspiracy theory", but just one of four possible explanations {the others being zoonotic (animal-to-human) origins, a deliberate bio-weapon release, or a prior endemicity ‘discovered’ by an outbreak of testing}.

To flag the danger of assumptions, such as (1) and (2) being presented as "fact", our review originally sought to spotlight a major, but neglected, issue in the health communication field: what is pharmaceutical propaganda and how does it differ from health communication. Media studies and health communication scholars should be exercising hyper-reflexivity in considering how the communications they study typically emerge in an externally directed field. Their field's solutionist emphasis is often driven by powerful external groupings’ motives, such as national government departments or multinational pharmaceutical companies. Such actors can be incentivised to manipulate messaging for reasons other than the simple concern to protect the public's wellbeing during a perceived crisis or emergency. 

Our reflexive article was originally rejected without explanation by one of the special issue’s editors. I have tweeted about how such behaviour is unacceptable, plus how AOSIS could update its policy to specify that an editor must provide explicit feedback on the reasons for desk rejection. This would meet COPE’s guideline that editors meet the needs of authors. Otherwise rejected authors might suspect that an AOSIS journal is not championing freedom of expression (and rather practicing scientific suppression) and is not precluding business needs (e.g. pharmaceutical support) from compromising intellectual standards. Tackling the danger of “successful” communications for dangerous pharmaceutical interventions as pharmaceutical propaganda is important, particularly given the rise of health authoritarianism during a “pandemic”.

Constructive criticism, plus new journal targets welcome?

Future research

There has been extensive censorship of legitimate, expert criticism during the COVID-19 event (Kheriaty, 2022. Shir-Raz et al, 2023. Hughes, 2024). Such scientific suppression makes the narrow frame visible for what the sponsors of global health authoritarianism permit for questioning of The Science™. In contrast to genuine science which innovates through critique, incorporated science does not welcome questioning. Like fascism, corporatist science views critiques of its interventions to be heresy. In the COVID-19 event, key opinion leaders who criticised the lack of scientific rigour behind public health measures (such as genetic vaccine mandates) were treated as heretics by a contemporary version of the Inquisition (Malone et al., 2024). Dissidents were accused of sharing "MDM" (Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation) assumed to place the public's lives at risk. Particularly in prestigious medical universities, questioning the dictates of health authorities and their powerful sponsors was viewed as being unacceptable, completely outside an Overton Window that had become far more restrictive due to fear- mongering around a "pandemic" (see Figure 1).

Higher Education is particularly susceptible to this groupthink, as it lends itself to a purity spiral, which in turn contributes to the growing spiral of silence for "unacceptable views". A purity spiral is a form of groupthink in which it is more beneficial to hold some views than to not hold them. In a process of moral outbidding, individual academics with more extreme views are rewarded. This was evidenced at universities where genetic vaccine proponents loudly supported the mandatory vaccination of students, despite them having minimal, if any, risk. In contrast, scholars expressing moderation, doubt or nuance faced ostracism as "anti-vaxxers". In universities, there are strong social conformity factors within its tight-knit community. Grants, career-support and other forms of institutional support depend on collegiality and alignment with prevailing norms. Being labeled a contrarian for questioning a ‘sacred cow’, such as "safe and effective" genetic vaccines, is likely to jeopardise one’s reputation, and academic future. Academic disciplines coalesce around shared paradigms and axiomatic truths, routinely amplifying groupthink. Challenging reified understandings as shibboleths can lead to exclusion from conferences, journals and cost scholars departmental, faculty, and even university support. Particularly where powerful funders object to such dissent!

Here, administrative orthodoxy can signal an “official” position for the university that chills debate. Dissenters fears of isolation and reprisal (such as poor evaluations and formal complaints for not following the official line) may convince them to self-censor. Particularly where the nonconformist assesses that the strength of opinion against his or her opinion is virulent, alongside high costs to expressing a disagreeable viewpoint- such as negotiating cancelation culture. Individuals who calculate that they have a low chance of success to convince others, and are likely to pay a steep price, self censor and contribute to the growing spiral of silence. The COVID-19 event serves as an excellent example for this growing spiral’s chilling effect versus free speech and independent enquiry.

COVID-19 is highly pertinent for critiquing censorship in the Medical and Health Sciences. Particularly as it featured conflicts of interest that contributed to global health "authorities" policy guidance. Notably, the World Health Organisation promoted poorly substantiated and even unscientific guidelines (Noakes et al., 2021), that merit being considered MDM. In following such dictates from the top policy makers of the Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP or G3P), most governments' health authorities seemed to ignore key facts. Notably: i. COVID-19 risk was steeply age-stratified (Verity et al, 2019. Ho et al, 2020. Bergman et al, 2021); ii. Prior COVID-19 infection can provide substantial immunity (Nattrass et al., 2021); iii. COVID-19 genetic vaccines did not stop disease transmission (Eyre et al. 2022, Wilder-Smith, 2022); iv. mass-masking was ineffective (Jefferson et al., 2023. Halperin, 2024); v. school closures were unwarranted (Wu et al., 2021); and, vi. there were better alternatives to lengthy, whole-society lockdowns (Coccia, 2021, Gandhi and Venkatesh, 2021. Herby et al., 2024). Both international policy makers' and local health authorities' flawed guidance must be open debate and rigorous critique. If public health interventions had been adapted to such key facts during the COVID-19 event, the resultant revised guidance could well have contributed to better social-, health-, and economic outcomes for billions of people!

This post focuses on six types of suppression techniques that were used against dissenting accounts whose voices are deemed illegitimate "disinformation" spreaders by the Global public-Private Partnerships (G3P)-sponsored industrial censorship complex. This an important concern, since claims that the suppression of free speech's digital reach can "protect public safety" were proved false during COVID-19. A case in point is the censorship of criticism against employee's vaccine mandates. North American employers' mandates are directly linked to excess disabilities and deaths for hundreds and thousands of working-age employees (Dowd, 2024). Deceptive censorship of individuals' reports of vaccine injuries as "malinformation", or automatically-labelling criticism of Operation Warp Speed as "disinformation", would hamper US employee's abilities to make fully-informed decisions on the safety of genetic vaccines. Such deleterious censorship must be critically examined by academics. In contrast, 'Disinformation-for-hire' scholars (Harsin, 2024) will no doubt remain safely ensconced behind their profitable MDM blinkers.

This post is the first in a series that spotlights the myriad of account suppression techniques that exist. For each, examples of censorship against health experts' opinions are provided. Hopefully, readers can then better appreciate the asymmetric struggle that dissidents face when their accounts are targeted by the censorship industrial complex with a myriad of these strategies spanning multiple social media platforms:

Practices for @Account suppression

#1 Deception - users are not alerted to unconstitutional limitations on their free speech

Since 2019, The Noakes Foundation has supported research into the brandjacking of influential celebrities' reputations on social media, and other poorly moderated platforms. The Fake Celebrity Endorsement (FCE) research team is documenting how this digital crime is an inscrutable, traumatic experience for celebrities, their representatives, and the financial victims who report being conned by fake endorsements. In addition to being traumatised by being featured in fake adverts, microcelebrities are further traumatised by the many reports from fans of their upset at being conned. A few celebrities have become targets for recurring cybervictimisation with no recourse, resulting in repeat trauma.

The FCE distinguishes 'digital crimes' from 'cybercrimes': Micro-fraudsters typically target private individuals with limited access to resources for combating digital crime. This contrasts to cybercrimes in which corporations are attacked (Olson, 2024). They are often well positioned to support their employees with costly resources that private individuals cannot afford. Research into the latter is well-resourced, as is interventions to stop it. By contrast, the fighting of digital crimes that impact private citizens are poorly resourced, particularly in the Global South. In the case of fake celebrity endorsements, press reports of this scam suggest that the problem grows each year- eleven South African celebrities fell victim to it in 2024, up from two in the first reports of 2014.

Fake celebrity endorsement is a digital crime that may require many authorities in society to combat it. Below is a list of the roleplayers that might potentially help prevent digital crimes:

4) Poorly-moderated content hosts

To make their offers seem more credible, scammers also post fake content on poorly-moderated sites (such as "clickbait news", "positive reviews" on online forums, and "scientific papers" on academic social networks). Even if such fake content is reported and removed, it can be quickly shifted by scammers to worse-moderated hosts...

5) Banks

As the financial victims legitimately authorise payments off their own accounts, victims do no enjoy recourse via their banks. To avoid new transactions from scammers, these victims often have to pay banks for new cards after terminating their old ones. It is unclear what role banks could adopt in combating digital crimes, wherein clients are defrauded whilst following a seemingly legitimate payment process.

Figure 2 - Authorities who could contribute to fighting digital crimes

6) Cyber defence companies

Cyber defence businesses are focused on providing profitable services to corporates. Such services are often unaffordable to even the wealthiest celebrities in SA. However, some may be fortunate to work for companies that use cyber defence services that pro-actively monitor cyberspace, and warn employees against digital impersonation and related risks. Such services include Darkivore, Flashpoint, Netcraft (FraudWatch International), SGS and ZeroFox. It does not seem that cyber defence companies can produce a profitable service that supports rapid responses to fake endorsements and related crimes. Even if it such a service was not unaffordable, most SA celebrities have not been targeted for revictimization. So it seems unlikely they would subscribe to such a service annually.

7) Cybercrime reporters and statistics gatherers

While there have been many reports for weight-loss and money-making cryptocurrency scams featuring particular celebrities, the media, celebrities agents and PR companies seem to report on these brandjackings as once-off events. Reports typically cover the latest flare-up to negatively impact one or two stars, plus their fans. At the same time, cybercrime statistics do not include this digital crime, whose costs to victims in SA are unknown, and difficult to aggregate. This points to a need for developing an holistic view of digital crime from consolidated reports. Research into digital crimes that can bridge the work of journalists and crime statisticians seems urgently needed to describe such crime's extant, frequency and costs to society. Developing robust reporting mechanisms for digital crimes (particularly ones that are challenging like 'fake social media adverts for phishing' {as they include several sub-crimes}) would seem an important contribution that law enforcement, researchers and statisticians can make. Reporters and researchers can also develop robust definitions of emergent digital crimes to grow awareness of them. This should aid more accurate reports.

8) Cybercrime researchers, and educators, in companies

In a similar collaborative vein, cybercrime researchers and educators in companies are working together to help combat digital crimes targeting their employees and clients. In particular, banks and insurance companies in SA are pro-actively raising awareness around phishing and other common digital crimes. This is done in communications that range from email newsletters, to pop-up warnings that clients must acknowledge reading post log-in.

9) Anti-crime activists (PBOs and NGOs)

Anti-digital crime education tends to focus on educating high school students and working professionals with preventative knowledge in English. However, our research into fake celebrity endorsement victims' online commentary suggest that most are over fifty five, with English being their second language, at best. In response, The Noakes Foundation has supported the development of modules in English for educating silver surfers on the most common digital crimes. Ideally, though, these modules (and reportfakeendorsement.com's content) should be available in South Africa's 11 official languages.

10) Social media platforms and their Big Tech owners

Social media companies, and their Big Tech owners, would seem to have a particular responsibility for protecting users from digital crime threats on their platforms. In contrast, there is a decade-long history in SA of even influential celebrities not being well-supported via speedy responses to their brandjacking, and scam adverts are seldom taken down based on celebrities', their representatives' and other victims' reports. 

The most popular platform for this scam in SA is Meta's Facebook and Instagram. Meta does not  understand the content that its users share (Horwitz, 2023). Further, it does not report on scam ecosystems based inside its own platforms. Consequently, neither Facebook nor Instagram can pro-actively identify digital crimes, let alone quickly adapt their systems to stop emergent threats from micro-fraudsters. It's left up to whistleblowers, former employees, investigative journalists and researchers to create awareness on these platforms' serious flaws, such as it being used as a scammers' ecosystem tied to scam-as-service ones. This would seems at odds with corporate responsibility- Meta should publicly report regarding its progress in tackling scam-ecosystems on its FB, WhatsApp and Instagram platforms. It could also pro-actively warn vulnerable users, such as the aged, against the latest scam risks. 

In a sense, digital crimes by cybercriminals on social networks can be considered a parasitic attack within a larger parasitic host: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are infomediaries that misrepresent themselves as symbionts in supporting users’ communal connections online. In reality, Meta’s business model is parasitic in relying on 3 000 000 000 users to share content (Robbins, 2018). Much of this content is not the work of original/creative producers, but rather sampled from content that's proved popular on other platforms. In essence, social media platforms are middlemen between content creators and their audiences, taking most of the profits from advertising. These platforms also take the intellectual property of online content creators. In the Global South this serves as a form of neocolonial data extraction as Big Tech multinationals from the Global North extract its data, with little being reciprocated. For example, while powerful celebrities in the US can enjoy access to dedicated Facebook support, there is no equivalent offering for influential SA users. Instead, they are lucky to stumble onto internal staff or Trusted Partners who can best help them respond to the Facebookjacking or Instajacking crimes.

In contrast to the usefulness of human insiders, reports to Meta's AI that manages users' reports of dubious accounts and content is simply not capable of recognising malicious advertisers' accounts; At face value, there is in nothing “wrong” with how the scammers’ accounts are set up - They have have a human profile (fake name) managing a business profile (fake name and business). Reporting the scam accounts is useless, since the fraudsters fill-in all the right criteria to fly under the radar! The scammers use 'Like Farms' and a network of fake profiles to all create a sense of legitimacy through 'liking, sharing and commenting' on posts and ads. The criminals also use a “legitimate website” - this is a bought domain and hosing and (questionable design) - selling a “product” and accumulating data of visitors' info and credit card details. All this seems to be legitimate business behaviour to AI, but is malicious and AI cannot detect that. Scammers use a (stolen) credit card, or hijacked meta Ads manager profile and run advertIf this content had truly been verified by a human it would have been taken down immediately. Even to the most untrained eye it was obvious that this content was a deep fake.s through their “business page”. This works for a short while until the card or the account are stopped, and then they just create another one. These ADs are selling a product online, the product is seemly harmless and well within the legal parameters of Meta's Community standards. The fact that its a fake product is immaterial to Meta, the onus in on the customer to know when they are being scammed, and if users try to report this to be a harmful product, it doesn’t work” as that is deemed a matter of personal opinion! Where such content is checked by a human moderators, the content is so obviously fake that they taken it down quickly.

It appears that Meta's Facebook and Instagram are turning a blind eye to this digital advertising crime. The benefit to META is clear with them reaping the rewards through advertisers' spending: Trustfull's 2024 report expects Deep Fake Fraud to reach $ 15.7 billion in 2024. Meta is set to take a large chunk of that ad-spend revenue in distributing fake, malicious content. It’s hard not to draw to the conclusion that it seems irrelevant to META if the content is genuine or a scam, or if the account used to promote these scams has been hacked or cloned. Either way, META and Facebook still profits. 

11) Financial investors

Investors are focused on the bottom-line of financial profit. To achieve it, social media platforms' developers spotlight the metrics of an ever-increasing flow of communication marking their platforms' commercial expansion. Given this all-consuming quantitative focus, it's unsurprising that these platforms' developers and investors are largely disinterested in paying the costs to understand the negative experiences on platforms. Particularly when combating these might impede their growth and monetisation!