Showing posts with label disinfodemic. Show all posts

Saturday, 29 March 2025

Techniques for suppressing health experts' social media accounts, part 1 - The Science™ versus key opinion leaders challenging the COVID-19 narrative

Written for researchers and others interested in the many techniques used to suppress COVID-19 dissidents' social media accounts, and digital voices.

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).

Figure 1. Narrowed Overton Window for COVID-19. Figures copied from (p137-138) in Dr Joseph Fraiman (2023). The dangers of self-censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic. In R. Malone, E. Dowd, & G. Fareed (Eds.), Canary In a Covid World: How Propaganda and Censorship Changed Our (My) World (pp. 132-147). Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp.

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

Social media users might assume that their constitutional right to free speech as citizens will be protected within, and across, digital platforms. However, global platforms may not support such rights in practice. No social media company openly discloses the extent to which users' accounts have, and are, being censored for expressing opinions on controversial topics. Nor do these platforms explicitly warn users what they consider to be impermissible opinions. Consequently, their users are not be forewarned regarding what may result in censorship. For example, many COVID19 dissidents were surprised that their legitimate critiques could result in account suspensions and bans (Shir-Raz, 2022). Typically, such censorship was justified by Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, Twitter and YouTube, due to users' violation of "community rules". In most countries, the freedom of speech is a citizen’s constitutional right that should be illegal to over-ride. It should be deeply concerning that such protections were not supported in the Fourth Estate of the digital public square during the COVID-19 event. Instead, the supra-national interests of health authoritarians came to supersede national laws to prevent (unproven) harms. This pattern of censorship is noticeable in many other scientific issue arenas, ranging from criticism against man-made climate change to skeptics challenging transgender medical ideology.

#2 Cyberstalking - facilitating the virtual and physical targeting of dissidents

An individual who exercises his or her voice against official COVID-19 narratives can expect to receive both legitimate, pro-social and unfair, anti-social criticism. While cyberstalking should be illegal, social media platforms readily facilitate the stalking and cyber-harassment of dissidents. An extreme example of this was Dr Christine Cotton's experiences on LinkedIn. Dr Cotton was an early whistleblower (Jan, 2022) against Pfizer's COVID-19 clinical trial's false claims of 95% efficacy for its treatments.

Her report identified the presence of bias and major deviations from good clinical practice. In press interviews, she reported that the trial did ‘not support validity in terms of efficacy, immunogenicity and tolerance of the results provided in the various Pfizer clinical reports that were examined in the emergency by the various health authorities. Christine shared this report with her professional network on LinkedIn, asking for feedback from former contacts in the pharmaceutical industry. The reception was mostly positive, but it and related posts were subject to a rapid content takedown by LinkedIn, ostensibly for not meeting community standards. At the same time, her profile became hypersurveiled. It attracted unexpected visits from 133 lawyers, the Ministry of Defence, employees of the US Department of State, the World Health Organisation, and others (p142). None of these profile viewers contacted her directly.

#3 Othering - enabling public character assassination via cyber smears

Othering is a process whereby individuals or groups are defined, labeled or targeted as not fitting in within the norms of a social group. This influences how people perceive and treat those who are viewed as being part of the in-group, versus those in an out-group. At a small scale, othering can result in a scholar being ostracised from their university department following academic mobbing and online academic bullying (Noakes & Noakes, 2021). At a large scale, othering entails a few dissidents on social media platforms being targeted for hypercriticism by gangstalkers.

Cyber gangstalking is a process of cyber harassment that follows cyberstalking, whereby a group of people target an individual online to harass him or her. Such attacks can involve gossip, teasing and bad-jacketing, repeated intimidation and threats, plus other fear-inducing behaviours. Skeptics' critical contributions can become swamped by pre-bunkers and fellow status-quo defenders. Such pseudo-skeptics may be sponsored to trivialise dissenters' critiques, thereby contributing to a fact choke against unorthodox opinions.

In Dr Christine Cotton's case in March 2022 her name was disclosed in a list as part of a French Senate investigation into adverse vaccine events. A ‘veritable horde of trolls seemingly emerged out of nowhere and started attacking’ her ‘relentlessly’ (p143). These trolls were inter-connected through subscribing to each others’ accounts, which allowed them to synchronise their attacks. They attempted to propagate as much negative information on Dr Cotton as possible in a ‘Twitter harassment scene’. Emboldened by their anonymity, the self-proclaimed “immense scientists” with masters in virology, vaccines, clinical research and biostatistics, launched a character assassination. They attacked her credentials and work history, whilst creating false associations (“Freemasonry” and “Illuminati”).

This suggests how identity politics sensibilities and slurs are readily misused against renegades. In the US, those questioning COVID-19 policies were labelled “far right” or “fascist”, despite promoting a libertarian critique of healthcare authoritarianism! In addition, orchestrators of cybermobbing tagged dissidents accounts to be those of someone who is: 'anti-science', 'an anti-vaxxer', 'biased', 'charlatan', 'celebrity scientist', 'conspiracy theorist', 'controversial', 'COVID-19 denier', 'disgraced scientist', 'formerly-respected', 'fringe expert', 'grifter', 'narcissist with a Galileo complex', 'pseudo-scientist', 'quack', 'salesman', 'sell-out' and 'virus', amongst other perjoratives. Such terms are used as a pre-emptive cognitive vaccine whose hypnotic language patterns ("conspiracy theorist") are intended to thwart audience engagement with critical perspectives. Likewise, these repeatedly used terms help grow a digital pillory that becomes foregrounded in the pattern of automated suggestions in search engine results.

In this Council of the Cancelled, Mike Benz, Prof Jay Bhattacharya, Nicole Shanahan and Dr Eric Weinstein speculate about hidden censorship architectures. One example is Google's automated tagging for "controversial" public figures. These can automatically feature in major mainstream news articles featuring COVID-19 dissidents. This is not merely a visual tag, but a cognitive tag. It marks "controversial" individuals with a contemporary (digital) scarlet letter.

In Dr Cotton's case, some trolls smeared her work in raising awareness of associations for the vaccine injured to be helping “anti-vaccine conspiracy sites”. She shares many cases of these injuries in her book and was amazed at the lack of empathy that Twitter users showed not just her, but also those suffering debilitating injuries. In response she featured screenshots of select insults on her blog at https://christinecotton.com/critics and blocked ‘hundreds of accounts’ online. In checking the Twitter profiles attacking her, she noticed that many with ‘behavioural issues were closeby’. Dr Cotton hired a ‘body and mind’ guard from a security company for 24-hour protection. Her account was reported for “homophobia”, which led to its temporary closing. After enduring several months of cyber-harassment by groups, a behaviour that can be severely be punished by EU law, Dr Cotton decided to file complaints against some of them. Christine crowdfunded filing legal complaints against Twitter harassers from a wide variety of countries. This complaint sought to work around how cyber harassers think anonymity is suitable for avoiding lawsuits for defamation, harassment and public insults.

#4 Not blocking impersonators or preventing brandjacked accounts

Impersonator's accounts claiming to belong to dissidents can quickly pop up on social media platforms. While a few may be genuine parodies, others serve identity jacking purposes. These may serve criminal purposes, in which scammers use fake celebrity endorsements to phish "customers" financial details for fraud. Alternately, intelligence services may use brandjacking for covert character assassination smears against dissidents.

The independent investigative journalist, Whitney Webb, has tweeted about her ongoing YouTube experience of having her channel's content buried under a fact choke of short videos created by other accounts:

Instead of blanket censorship, I am having YouTube bury all my actual interviews/content with videos that use short, out of context clips from interviews to promote things I would never and have never said. Below is what happens when you search my name on YouTube, every single… pic.twitter.com/xNGrfMMq52
— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) August 12, 2024

Whether such activities are from intelligence services or cybercriminals, they are very hard for dissidents and/or their representatives to respond effectively against. Popular social media companies (notably META, X and TikTok) seldom respond quickly to scams, or to the digital "repersoning" discussed in a Corbett Report discussion between James Corbett and Whitney Webb.

In Corbett's case, after his account was scrubbed from YouTube, many accounts featuring his identity started cropping up there. In Webb's case, she does not have a public profile outside of X, but these were created featuring her identity on Facebook and YouTube. "Her" channels clipped old interviews she did and edited them into documentaries on material Whitney has never publicly spoken about, such as Bitcoin and CERN. They also misrepresented her views on the transnational power structure behind the COVID-19 event, suggesting she held just Emmanuel Macron and Klaus Schwab responsible for driving it. They used AI thumbnails of her, and superimposed her own words in the interviews. Such content proved popular and became widely reshared via legitimate accounts, pointing to the difficulty of dissidents countering it. She could not get Facebook to take down the accounts, without supplying a government-issued ID to verify her own identity.

Digital platforms may be disinterested in offering genuine support- they may not take any corrective action when following proxy orders from the US Department of State (aka 'jawboning') or members of the Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence agency. In stark contrast to marginalised dissenters, VIPS in multinationals enjoy access to online threat protection services (such as ZeroFox) for executives that cover brandjacking and over 100 other cybercriminal use-cases.

#5 Filtering an account's visibility through ghostbanning

As the Google Leaks (2019) and Facebook- (2021) and Twitter Files (2022) revelations have spotlighted, social media platforms have numerous algorithmic censorship options, such as the filtering the visibility of users' accounts. Targeted users may be isolated and throttled for breaking "community standards" or government censorship rules. During the COVID-19 event, dissenters' accounts were placed in silos, de-boosted, and also subject to reply de-boosting. Contrarians' accounts were subject to ghostbanning (AKA shadow-banning)- this practice will reduce an account’s visibility or reach secretly, without explicitly notifying its owner. Ghostbanning limits who can see the posts, comments, or interactions. This includes muting replies and excluding targeted accounts' results under trends, hashtags, searches and in followers’ feeds (except where users seek a filtered account's profile directly). Such suppression effectively silences a user's digital voice, whilst he or she continues to post under the illusion of normal activity. Ghostbanning is thus a "stealth censorship" tactic linked to content moderation agendas.

This term gained prominence with the example of the Great Barrington Declaration's authors, Professors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta. Published on October 4, 2020, this public statement and proposal flagged grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the dominant COVID-19 policies. It argued that an approach for focused protection should rather be followed than blanket lockdowns, and that allowing controlled spread among low-risk groups would eventually result in herd immunity. Ten days later, a counter- John Snow Memorandum was published in defence of the official COVID-19 narrative's policies. Mainstream media and health authorities amplified it, as did social media given the memorandum's alignment with prevailing platform policies against "misinformation" circa-2020. In contrast, the Great Barrington Declaration was targeted indirectly through platform actions against its proponents and related content:

Stanford Professor of Medicine, Dr Jay Bhattacharya’s Twitter account was revealed (via the 2022 Twitter Files) to have been blacklisted, reducing its visibility. His tweets questioning lockdown efficacy and vaccine mandates were subject to algorithmic suppression. Algorithms could flag his offending content with terms like “Visibility Filtering” (VF) or “Do Not Amplify”, reducing its visibility. For instance, Bhattacharya reported that his tweets about the Declaration and seroprevalence studies (showing wider COVID-19 spread than official numbers suggested) were throttled. Journalist Matt Taibbi's reporting on the "Twitter Files" leaks confirmed that Twitter had blacklisted Prof Bhattacharya's account, limiting its reach due to his contrarian stance. YouTube also removed videos in which he featured, such as interviews in which he criticised lockdown policies.

The epidemiologist and biostatistician, Prof Kulldorff observed that social media censorship stifled opportunities for scientific debate. He experienced direct censorship on multiple platforms, which included shadowbans. Twitter temporarily suspended his account in 2021 for tweeting that not everyone needed the COVID-19 vaccine ('Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children'). Posts on X and web reports indicate Kulldorff was shadowbanned beyond this month-long suspension. The Twitter Files, released in 2022, revealed he was blacklisted, meaning his tweets’ visibility was algorithmically reduced. Twitter suppressed Kulldorff's accurate genetic vaccine critique, preventing comments and likes. Internal Twitter flags like “Trends Blacklisted” or “Search Blacklisted” (leaked during the 2020 Twitter hack) suggest Kulldorff's account was throttled in searches and trends, a hallmark of shadowbanning where reach is curtailed without notification. Algorithmic deamplification excluded Prof Kulldorff's tweets from being seen under trends, search results, or followers’ feeds- except where users sought his profile directly. This reflects how social media companies may apply visibility filters (such as a Not Safe For Work (NSFW) view). Kulldorff also flagged that LinkedIn’s censorship pushed him to platforms like Gab, implying a chilling effect on his professional network presence.

An Oxford University epidemiologist, Professor Gupta faced less overt account-level censorship, but still had to negotiate content suppression. Her interviews and posts on Twitter advocating for herd immunity via natural infection amongst the young and healthy were often flagged, or down-ranked.

#6 Penalising accounts that share COVID-19 "misinformation"

In addition to ghostbanning, social media platforms could target accounts for sharing content on COVID-19 that contradicted guidance from the Global Private Partnership (GP3)'s macro-level stakeholders, such as the Centre for Disease Control or the World Health Organisation. In Twitter's case, it introduced a specific COVID-19 misinformation policy in March, 2020, which prohibited claims about transmission, treatments, vaccines, or public health measures that the COVID-19 hegemony deemed “false or misleading.” Such content either had warning labels added to it, or was automatically deleted:

Tweets with suspected MDM were tagged with warnings like “This claim about COVID-19 is disputed” or with labels linking to curated "fact-checks" on G3P health authority pages. This was intended to reduce a tweet’s credibility without immediate removal, whilst also diminishing its poster's integrity.

Tweets that broke this policy were deleted outright after flagging by automated systems or human moderators. For instance, Alex Berenson’s tweets questioning lockdown efficacy were removed, contributing to his eventual ban in August 2021. In Dr Christine Cotton's case, Twitter classified her account as “sensitive content”. It gradually lost visibility with the tens of thousands of followers it had attracted. In response, she created a new account to begin ‘from scratch’ in August 2022. The Twitter Files revealed that such censorship was linked to United States government requests (notably from the Joe Biden administration and Federal Bureau of Investigations). For example, 250,000 tweets flagged by Stanford’s Virality Project in 2021 were removed by Twitter.

In March 2020, Meta expanded its misinformation policies to target COVID-19-related MDM. Facebook and Instagram applied content labelling and down-ranking, with posts allegedly featuring MDM being labeled with warnings (such as 'False Information' or 'See why health experts say this is wrong') that linked to official sources. Such posts were also down-ranked in the News Feed to reduce their visibility. Users were notified of violations and warned that continued sharing could further limit reach or lead to harsher action. In late 2021, down-ranking also became applied to “vaccine-skeptical” content not explicitly violating rules but potentially discouraging vaccination. Posts violating policies were removed outright.

With LinkedIn's smaller, professional user base, and the platform's lower emphasis on real-time virality, led it to prefer the outright removal of accounts over throttling via shadow-bans. Accounts identified as posting MDM could face temporary limits, such as restricted posting privileges or inability to share articles for a set period. LinkedIn users received warnings after a violation, often with a chance to delete the offending post themselves to avoid further action. Such notices cited the policy breach, linking to LinkedIn’s stance on official health sources. This approach to COVID-19 MDM followed LinkedIn’s broader moderation tactics for policy violations.

In Dr Cotton's case, she shared her Pfizer COVID-19 clinical trial's critique on LinkedIn to get feedback from her professional network of former contacts in the pharmaceutical industry. This first post was removed within 24 hours (p.142), and her second within an hour. This hampered her ability to have a debate on the methodology of Pfizer's trial with competent people. Prof Kulldorff also had two posts deleted in August 2021: one linking to an interview on vaccine mandate risks and another reposting Icelandic health official comments on herd immunity.

Accounts that posted contents with links to external, alternate, independent media (such as Substack articles or videos on Rumble) also saw such posts down-ranked, hidden or automatically removed.

This is the first post on techniques for suppressing health experts' social media accounts (and the second on COVID-19 censorship in the Fifth Estate). My next in the series will address more extreme measures against COVID-19 dissidents, with salient examples.

Please follow this blog or me on social media to be alerted of the next post. If you'd like to comment, please share your views below, ta.

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 reveal how multinational pharmaceutical companies, unelected global "health" organisations, national governments, social media and traditional broadcast companies all conspired to silence dissent that oppossed costly COVID-19 interventions. Regardless of their levels of expertise, critics who questioned this narrative in the Fourth or Fifth Estate were forced to negotiate 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 tightly controlled, narrow narrative window. 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; dissenting minds should be welcomed for great science, and a flawed scientific consensus can itself be dangerous. Silencing dissent has important public health ramifications, particularly where the potential for suggesting, and exploring, better interventions becomes closed. Science-, health communication, and media studies scholars may also ignore the inability of medical experts to accurately define what disinformation is, particularly where global policy makers face conflicts of interest (as in the World Health Organisation's support for genetic vaccines).

Censorship and the suppression of legitimate COVID-19 dissent is dangerously asymmetrical: 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 their exercise of the basic right to free speech, and delivering sustained critiques. A related 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".

Content suppression on social media is an important, but neglected topic, and this post strives to flag the wide variety of techniques that may be use in digital content suppression. Techniques are listed in order of seemingly 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.

Critical commentary may also be drowned out when platforms, such as YouTube, bury long format interviews amongst short 'deep fake' videos. These can range from featuring comments the critic never made, to fake endorsements from cybercriminals (as described on X by Whitney Webb, or Professor Tim Noakes on YouTube).

#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 due to dodgy account interactions or external platform links

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'.

Social media platforms' algorithms may also blacklist content from external platforms that are not viewed to be credible sources (for example, part of an alternative {alt-right} media), or seen as competing rivals (X penalises the visibility of posts that feature links to external platforms).

#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.

Figure 1. Youtube only offers dislike option for Rassmussen Reports video on Vaccine Deaths- sourced from Dr Steven Kirsch's newsletter (29.05.2024)

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 Disabling public commentary

Social media platforms may limit the mentionability of content, by not offering the opportunity to quote public posts. User's right-to-reply may be blocked, and critiques may be concealed by preventing them from being linked to from replies.

#8 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.

#9 Rapid 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.

PropagandaInFocus describes how LinkedIn users are subject to a policy of misinformation that prevents content being shared that 'directly contradicts guidance from leading global health organisations and public health authorities'. Dr David Thunder shared an example of his automated LinkedIn post removal for (1) sharing a scientific study that confirmed that children are at negligible risk of suffering severe disease from COVID-19, and (2) questioning the FDA decision to approve Emergency Use Authorisation for COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months old. No matter that many other studies confirm both positions, LinkedIn took this post down and threatened to restrict his account.

#10 Creating memory holes

Extensive content takedowns can serve a memory-holing aim, whereby facts and memories of the past become suppressed, erased or forgotten for political convenience. Long after the COVID-19's "pandemic", an Orwellian Ministry of Truth continues to memory-hole many health authority decision makers' failures, plus those of the mainstream media's and most national governments. As discussed here on YouTube by Mary Lou Singleton, Meghan Murphy and Jennifer Sey, such failures included: mandating masking and school-closures for children (who were never at risk); never questioning the official COVID-19 statistics (such as CNN's 'death ticker'); straight quoting Pfizer press releases as "journalism", whilst mocking individuals who chose to 'do their own research'.

Dr Mark Changizi presents four science moments on memory-holing. In X video 1 and X video 2, he highlights how memory-holing on social media is very different from its traditional form. He uses X (formerly X) as an autobiographical tool, creating long threads that serve as a form of visual memory that he can readily navigate. The unique danger of social media account removal/suspension for censorship extends beyond losing one's history-of-'use' on that platform, to include all 'mentions' related to its content (ranging from audience likes, to their reply and quote threads). This changes the centrally-controlled communication history of what has occurred on a social media platform. Such censorship violates the free speech rights of all persons who have engaged with that removed account, even its fiercest critics, as they also lose an historical record of what they said.

By contrast decentralised publications (such as hardcopy publications) are very hard for authorities to memory hole, since sourcing all hardcopies can be nearly impossible for censors. While winners can write history, historians who have access to historical statements can rewrite it. As COVID-19 memory-holing on social media platforms challenges such rewriting, its users must think around creating uncensorable records (such as the book Team Reality: Fighting the Pandemic of the Uninformed). In X video 3, he highlights that freedom of expression is a liability, as expressions push reputation chips on the table. The more claims one stake's, the greater the risk to one's reputation if they're wrong. So, another aspect of memory holing lies in an individual's potential desire for memory-holing their own platform content, should they prove to be wrong. In X video 4, Dr Changizi also spotlights that the best form of memory-holing is self-censorship, whereby individuals see other accounts been suspended, or removed for expressing particular opinions. The witnesses then decide not to express such opinions, since it might endanger their ability to express other opinions. While such absence of speech is immeasurable, it would seem the most powerful memory-holing technique. Individuals' silencing their own voices do not create history.

#11 Rewriting history

Linking back to the Fact Choke technique are attempts at historical revisionism by health authoritians, and their allies. An example of this are claims in the mainstream media that critics of the orthodox narrative were "right for the wrong reasons" regarding the failure of COVID-19 lockdowns, the many negative impacts of closing schooling, businesses, and enforcing mandatory vaccination policies.

#12 Concealing the motives behind censorship, and who its real enforcers are

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. As this is the least likely explanation, other hypotheses merit serious investigation as they are 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? (iv) Critics of these three explanations allege that a prior endemicity was ‘discovered’ by an outbreak of testing. 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 dissident views like these, social media platforms stop their users from learning about the many legitimate COVID-19 debates that are taking place between experts. This is not a matter of keeping users "secure" from "unsafe" knowledge, but rather networked publics being targeted for social control in the interests of powerful conspirators. In particular, the weaponised deception of social media censorship suits the agenda of the Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP or G3P), and its many stakeholders. As described by Dr Joseph Mercola in The Rise of the Global Police State, each organisational stakeholder plays a policy enforcement role in a worldwide network striving to centralise authority at a global level.

Global Public-Private Partnership G3P organogram

Figure 2. Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P) stakeholders - sourced from IainDavis.com (2021) article at https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/12/investigative-reports/the-new-normal-the-civil-society-deception.

G3P stakeholders have a strong stake in growing a censorship industrial complex to thwart legitimate dissent. Critiques of the official COVID-19 "pandemic" measures are just one example The industrial censorship complex also strives to stifle robust critiques of (1) climate change "science", (2) "gender affirming" (transgender) surgery, (3) mass migration (aka the Great Replacement), (4) and rigged "democratic" elections, amongst other "unacceptable" opinions. Rather than being for the public's good, such censorship actually serves the development of a transhumanist, global technocratic society. The digital surveillance dragnet of the technocracy suits the interests of a transnational ruling class in maintaining social control of Western society, and other vassals. This will be expanded upon in a future post tackling the many censorship and suppression techniques that are being against (ii) accounts.

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.

Friday, 23 December 2022

A summary of 'Who is watching the World Health Organisation? ‘Post-truth’ moments beyond infodemic research'

Written for infodemic/disinfodemic researchers and those interested in the scientific suppression of COVID-19 dissidents.

Dr David Bell, Emeritus Professor Tim Noakes and my opinion piece 'Who is watching the World Health Organisation? ‘Post-truth’ moments beyond infodemic research’ is available at https://td-sa.net/index.php/td/article/view/1263. It was written for a special issue, 'Fear and myth in a post-truth age’ from the Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa (see call at https://aosis.co.za/call-for-papers-special-collection-in-journal-for-transdisciplinary-research/).

A major criticism this paper raises is that infodemic research lacks earnest discussion on where health authorities’ own choices and guidelines might be contributing to ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’ and even ‘malinformation’. Rushed guidance based on weak evidence from international health organisations can perpetuate negative health and other societal outcomes, not ameliorate them! If health authorities’ choices are not up for review and debate, there is a danger that a hidden goal of the World Health Organisation (WHO) infodemic (or related disinfodemic funders’ research) could be to direct attention away from funders' multitude of failures in fighting pandemics with inappropriate guidelines and measures.

In The regime of ‘post-truth’: COVID-19 and the politics of knowledge (at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01596306.2021.1965544), Kwok, Singh and Heimans (2019) describe how the global health crisis of COVID-19 presents a fertile ground for exploring the complex division of knowledge labour in a ‘post-truth’ era. Kwok et al. (2019) illustrates this by describing COVID-19 knowledge production at university. Our paper focuses on the relationships between health communication, public health policy and recommended medical interventions.

Divisions of knowledge labour are described for (1) the ‘infodemic/disinfodemic research agenda’, (2) ‘mRNA vaccine research’ and (3) ‘personal health responsibility’. We argue for exploring intra- and inter relationships between influential knowledge development fields. In particular, the vaccine manufacturing pharmaceutical companies that drive and promote mRNA knowledge production. Within divisions of knowledge labour (1-3), we identify key inter-group contradictions between the interests of agencies and their contrasting goals. Such conflicts are useful to consider in relation to potential gaps in the WHO’s infodemic research agenda:

For (1), a key contradiction is that infodemic scholars benefit from health authority funding may face difficulties questioning their “scientific” guidance. We flag how the WHO ’s advice for managing COVID-19 departed markedly from a 2019 review of evidence it commissioned (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35444988).

(2)’s division features very different contradictions. Notably, the pivotal role that pharmaceutical companies have in generating vaccine discourse is massively conflicted. Conflict of interest arises in pursuing costly research on novel mRNA vaccines 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. The division of knowledge labour for (2) mRNA vaccine development should not be considered separately from COVID-19’s in Higher Education or the (1) infodemic research agenda. Multinational pharmaceutical companies direct the research agenda in academia and medical research discourse through the lucrative grants they distribute. Research organisations dependant on external funding for covering budget shortfalls will be more susceptible to the influence of those funders on their research programs.

We spotlight the overwhelming evidence for the importance of (3) personal responsibility. In the COVID-19 pandemic, its discourses seemed largely ignored by Higher Education leadership and government. We flag how contradictions in (3)’s division of knowledge labour in a pandemic can explain such neglect. Personal responsibility is not a commercial site for generating large profits, some of which may be donated in supporting academic research. Research into effective, low-cost interventions seems to be at odds with the economic interests of both grant recipients and Big Pharma donors. Replacing costly treatments with low-cost alternatives would not only greatly diminish the profitability of existing funders, but also reduce the pool of new ones, plus the size of future donations. It is also important to reflect on how else the scientific enterprise at university lends itself to being an arena for misinformation. New information in science that refutes existing dogma does not become accepted immediately. Therefore a period exists when new ideas will be considered as misinformation especially by those with an agenda to suppress its acceptance.

However, from the perspective of orthodoxy, views that support new paradigms are unverified knowledge (and potentially "misinformation"). Any international health organisation that wishes to be an evaluator must have the scientific expertise for managing this ongoing ‘paradox’, or irresolvable contradiction. Organisations such as the WHO may theoretically be able to convene such knowledge, but their dependency on funding from conflicted parties would normally render them ineligible to perform such a task. This is particularly salient where powerful agents can collaborate across divisions of knowledge labour for establishing an institutional oligarchy. Such hegemonic collaboration can suppress alternative viewpoints that contest and query powerful agents’ interests.

It is concerning how many Communication and Media Studies researchers are ignoring such potential abuse of power, whilst supporting censorship of dissenters based on unproven "harms". Embedded researchers seem to ignore that the Centers for Disease Control, National Institute for Health and the WHO’s endorsement of multinational pharmaceutical companies’ products is a particularly troubling development: it marks a ‘new normal’ of institutional capture by industry sponsoring regulators who become their ‘lobbyists’. This contrasts to the silo efforts of external influence in the past, for example by lobbyists working for Big Tobacco or Big Food. They spun embedded scientific research touting the ‘benefits’ of smoking and processed foods. At the same time, evidence of harm was attacked as "junk science".

At least with cigarettes and ultra-processed foods, many individuals have the choice to buy or avoid paying. In stark contrast, tax-paying publics have no such option in avoiding the steep costs of mRNA vaccines. Public taxes pay for these treatments, while less expensive and potentially more effective interventions are ignored. Paying for vaccines takes funding away from interventions that would address wider and more pressing global health needs, in particular, poverty, malaria, tuberculosis and T2DM.

This paper alerts researchers to a broad range of ‘post-truth’ moments and flags the danger of relying on global health authorities to be the sole custodians of who is allowed to define what comprises an information disorder. Challenges to scientific propaganda from authorities captured by industry should not automatically be (mis-) characterised as low quality or harmful information. Rather, the digital voices of responsible dissenters can be valuable in protecting scientific integrity and public health (for example, @ProfTimNoakes should not be blocked from his Twitter account for expressing dissent!)

Our article results from collaboration between The Noakes Foundation and PANDA. The authors thank JTSA’s editors for the opportunity to contribute to its special issue, the paper’s critical reviewers for their helpful suggestions and AOSIS for editing and proof-reading the paper.

This is the third publication from The Noakes Foundation’s Academic Free Speech and Digital Voices (AFSDV) project. Do follow me on Twitter or https://www.researchgate.net/project/Academic-Free-Speech-and-Digital-Voices-AFSDV for updates regarding it.

I welcome you sharing constructive comments, below.

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