Friday, 6 June 2025
Techniques for suppressing health experts' social media accounts (7 - 12, part 2) - 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.
This is the second post alerting readers to the myriad of techniques that social media companies continue to use against key opinion leaders that question the dominant consensus from The Science™. While examples are provided for techniques versus prominent critics of the official COVID-19 narrative, these are also readily applied for stifling the emergence of other issue arenas. These range from the United States of America's support for forever wars via a ghost budget (Bilmes, 2018), to man-made climate change, and from low carbohydrate diets to transgender "gender affirming" medical surgery ideology. These dogmatic prescriptions by the global policy decision makers of the Global Private Partnership (G3P or GPPP) are presented as a "scientific consensus", but are unscientific when protected from being questioned- especially by legitimate experts with dissenting arguments.
#7 Concealing the sources behind dissidents' censorship
An important aspect of information control is that the sources behind it will be very well hidden from the public. For the organisers of propaganda, their ideal targets do not appreciate that they are receiving propaganda, nor should they recognise its source. Their audiences' ignorance is a key aspect of psychological warfare (otherwise known as 5th generation warfare (Abbot, 2010, Krishnan, 2024). Likewise for censors, its targets and their followers should ideally not be aware that they are being censored, nor able to identity the sources of their censorship. Accordingly, there is significant deception around the primary sources for social media censorship being the platforms themselves, and their policies. Instead, these platforms are largely responding to co-ordinated COVID-19 narrative control from G3P members who span each of the six estates*.
The well-funded, complicity theorists for a COVID-19 "Infodemic" (for example- Calleja et al., 2021, Caulfield, 2020, DiResta, 2022, Schiffrin, 2022) may genuinely believe in advocating for censorship as a legitimate, organic counterweight to "malinformation". In contrast, researchers at the Unlimited Hangout point out that this censorship is highly centralised, aiming at opinions that are deemed "illegitimate" merely for disagreeing with the positions of the most powerful policy makers at the G3P's macro-level. Ian Davis writes that the G3P policy makers are Chatham House, the Club of Rome, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Rockefellers and the World Economic Forum. Each guides international policy distributors, including the; International Monetary Fund, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, United Nations, World Health Organisation, plus "philanthropists" {eg. the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)}, multinational corporations and global non-governmental organisations..
Mr Bill Gates serves as an example of the Sixth Estate exercising undue influence on public health, especially Africa's: His foundation is the largest private benefactor of the World Health Organization. The BMGF finances the health ministries in virtually every African country. Mr Gates can place conditions on that financing, such as vaccinating a certain percentage of a country’s population. Some vaccines and health-related initiatives that these countries purchase are developed by companies that Gates’ Cascade Investment LLC invests in. As a result, he can benefit indirectly from stock appreciation. This is alongside tax savings from his donations, whilst his reputation as a ‘global health leader’ is further burnished. In South Africa, the BMGF have directly funded the Department of Health, SA’s regulator SAHPRA, plus its Medical Research Council, top medical universities and the media (such as the Mail and Guardian’s health journalism centre, Bhekisisa). All would seem highly motivated to protect substantial donations by not querying Mr Gates’ vaccine altruism. However, the many challenges of the Gates Foundation’s dominating role in its transnational philanthropy must not be ignored. Such dominance poses a challenge to justice- locals’ rights to control the institutions that can profoundly impact their basic interests (Blunt, 2022). While the BMGF cannot be directly tied to COVID-19 social media account censorship, it is indisputable that Mr Gates' financial power and partner organisations indirectly suppressed dissenting voices by prioritising certain COVID-19 treatment narratives (Politico, 2022A, 2022B).
At a meso-level, select G3P policy enforcers organise that macro-level's policy directives are followed by both national governments (and their departments, such as health) and scientific authorities (including the AMA, CDC, EMA, FDA, ICL, JCVI, NERVTAG, NIH, MHRA and SAGE). Enforcers strive to prevent rival scientific ideas gaining traction, and thereby challenging its policymakers' dictates. These bodies task psychological 'nudge' specialists (Junger and Hirsch, 2024), propagandists and other experts with convincing the public to accept, and ideally buy-into, G3P policies. This involves censorship and psychological manipulation via public relations, propaganda, disinformation and misinformation. The authors of such practices are largely unattributed. Dissidents facing algorithmic censorship through social media companies' opaque processes of content moderation are unlikely to be able to identify the true originator of their censorship in a complex process. Content moderation is a 'multi-dimensional process through which content produced by users is monitored, filtered, ordered, enhanced, monetised or deleted on social media platforms' (Badouard and Bellon, 2025). This process spans a 'great diversity of actors' who develop specific practices of content regulation (p3). Actors may range from activist users and researchers who flag content, to fact-checkers from non-governmental organisations and public authorities. If such actors disclose their involvement in censorship, this may only happen much later. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s 2024 letter to the House Judiciary Committee revealed that the Biden administration pressured Meta to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humour and satire, in 2021.
#8 Blocking a user’s access to his or her account
A social media platform may stop a user from being able to login to his or her account. Where the platform does not make this blocking obvious to a users' followers, this is deceptive. For example, Emeritus Professor Tim Noakes' Twitter account was deactivated for months after querying health authorities' motivations in deciding on interventions during the COVID-19 "pandemic". Many viewers would not recognise that his seemingly live profile was in fact inactive, since it looked to be active. The only clue was that @ProfTimNoakes had not tweeted for a long time. This was highly unusual.
This suspension followed Twitter's introduction of a “five-strike” system, with repeat offenders or egregious violations leading to permanent bans. Twitter's system tracked violations, with the first and second strikes resulting in a warning or temporary lock. A third strike resulted in a 12-hour suspension, while a 7-day suspension followed a 4th strike. Users faced a permanent ban for a 5th strike. In Professor Tim Noakes' case, he was given a vague warning regarding 'breaking community rules etc.' (email correspondence, 24.10.2022), this followed him noticing a loss of followers and his tweets reach being restricted. Twitter 'originally said I was banned for 10 hours. But after 10 hours when I tried to re-access it they would not send me a code to enter. When I complained they just told me I was banned. When I asked for how long, they did not answer.' In reviewing his tweets, Prof. Noakes noticed that some had been (mis-)labelled by Twitter to be "misleading" before his suspension (see Figure 1 below).
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| Figure 1. Screenshot of @ProfTimNoakes' "controversial" tweet on President Macron not taking COVID-19 'experimental gene therapy' (24 October, 2022) |
Prof Noakes had also tweet-quoted Alec Hogg’s BizNews article regarding Professor Salim Abdool Karim’s conflicts of interest, adding 'something about' cheque book science. The @ProfTimNoakes account was in a state of limbo after seven days, but was never permanently banned. Usually, accounts placed on “read-only” mode, or temporary lockouts, required tweet deletion to regain full access. However, @ProfTimNoakes latest tweets were not visible, and he was never asked to delete any. In addition to account login blocks, platforms may also suspend accounts from being visible. But this was not applied to @ProfTimNoakes. In response to being locked out, Prof Noakes shifted to using his alternate @loreofrunning account- its topics of nutrition, running and other sports seemed safe from the reach of unknown censors' Twitter influence.
#9 Temporary suspensions of accounts (temporary user bans)
#10 Permanent suspension of accounts, pages and groups (complete bans)
In contrast to Twitter's five-strikes system, Meta's Facebook's was not as formalised. It tracked violations on accounts, pages and groups. The latter serve different functions in Facebook’s system architecture (Broniatowski, et al. 2023): only page administrators may post in pages, which are designed for brand promotion and marketing. In contrast, any member may post in groups. These serve as a forum for members to build community and discuss shared interests. In addition, pages may serve as group administrators. From December 2020, Meta began removing "false claims about COVID-19 vaccines" that were "debunked by public health experts". This included "misinformation" about their efficacy, ingredients, safety, or side effects. Repeatedly sharing "debunked claims" risked escalating penalties to individual users/administrators, pages and groups. Penalties ranged from from reduced visibility to removal and permanent suspension. For example, if a user posted that 'COVID vaccines cause infertility' "without evidence", this violated policy thresholds. The user was then asked to acknowledge the violation, or appeal. Appeals were often denied if the content clashed with official narratives.
Meta could choose to permanently ban individual-, fan page- and group- accounts on Facebook. For example, high-profile repeated offenders were targeted for removals. In November 2020, the page "Stop Mandatory Vaccination", which was one of the platform’s largest "anti-vaccine" fan pages was removed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Instagram account was permanently removed in 2021 for "sharing debunked COVID-19 vaccine claims". The non-profit he founded, Children’s Health Defense was suspended from both Facebook and Instagram in August 2022 for its repeated violations of Meta’s COVID-19 misinformation policies.
Microsoft's LinkedIn generally has stricter content moderation for professional content than other social networks. It updated its 'Professional Community Policies' for COVID-19 to prohibit content contradicting guidance from global health organisations, like the CDC and WHO. This included promoting unverified treatments and downplaying the "pandemic"’s severity. Although LinkedIn has not disclosed specific thresholds, high-profile cases evidence that the persistent sharing of contrarian COVID-19 views—especially if flagged by users, or contradicting official narratives—would lead to removal. Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, Dr Robert Malone, and Mr Steve Kirsch and accounts have all been permanently suspended.
#11 Non-disclosure of information around banning's rationale for account-holders
Social media platforms' Terms of Service (TOS) may ensure that these companies are not legally obligated to share information with their users on the precise reasons for their accounts being suspended. Popular platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and X can terminate accounts at their sole discretion without providing detailed information to users. Such suspensions are typically couched opaquely in terms of policy violation (such as being in breach of community standards).
Less opaque details may be forthcoming if the platform's TOS is superseded by a country, or regional bloc's, laws. In the US, section 230 of its Communications Decency Act allows platforms to moderate content as they see fit. They are only obligated to disclose reasons under a court order, or if a specific law applies (such as one related to data privacy). By contrast, companies operating under European Union countries are expected to comply with the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). Here, platforms must provide a 'statement of reasons' for content moderation decisions, including suspensions, with some level of detail about the violation. Whilst compliant feedback must be clear and user-friendly, granular specifics may not be a DSA requirement. In the EU and USA, COVID-19 dissidents could only expect detailed explanations in response to legal appeals, or significant public pressure. Internal whistleblowing and investigative reports, such as the Facebook and Twitter files, also produced some transparency.
One outcome of this opaque feedback is that the reasons for dissidents' COVID-19 health experts' accounts being suspended are seldom made public. Even where dissidents have shared their experiences, the opaque processes and actors behind COVID-19 censorship remain unclear. Even reports from embedded researchers, such as The Center for Countering Digital Hate's "Disinformation Dozen", lack specificity. While it reported how Meta permanently banned 16 accounts, and restricted 22 others, for "sharing anti-vaccine content" in response to public reporting in 2021. However, the CCDH did not explicitly name the health experts given permanent suspensions. Hopefully, a recent 171-page federal civil rights suit by half of the dissidents mentioned in this report against the CCDH, Imran Ahmed, U.S. officials & tech giants will expose more about who is behind prominent transnational censorship & reputational warfare (Ji, 2025).
#12 No public reports from platforms regarding account suspensions and censorship requests
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| Figure 2. Slide on 'Critical social justice as a protected ideology in Higher Education, but contested in social media hashtag communities' (Noakes, 2024) |
More about censorship techniques against dissenters on social networks
More about censorship techniques against dissenters on social networks
- Techniques for suppressing health experts' social media accounts, part 1 - The Science™ versus key opinion leaders challenging the COVID-19 narrative
- Content suppression techniques against dissent in the Fifth Estate - examples of COVID-19 censorship on social media
N.B. I am writing a third post on account censorship during COVID-19, that will cover at least three more serious techniques. Do follow me on X to learn when that is published. Please suggest improvements to this post in the comments below, or reply to my tweet thread at https://x.com/travisnoakes/status/1930989080231203126.
Sunday, 22 December 2024
A role for qualitative methods in researching Twitter data on a popular science article's communication
Written for scholars and students who are interested in using qualitative research methods for research with small data, such as tweets on X.
Myself, Dr Corrie Uys, Dr Pat Harpur and Prof Izak van Zyl's open-access paper, 'A role for qualitative methods in researching Twitter data on a popular science article's communication' identifies several potential qualitative research contributions in analysing small data from microblogging communications:
Qualitative research can provide a rich contextual framing for how micro-practices (such as tweet shares for journal articles...) relate to important social dynamics (... like debates on paradigms within higher-level social strata in the Global Health Science field) plus professionals' related identity work. Also, in-depth explorations of microblogging data following qualitative methods can contribute to the research process by supporting meta-level critiques of missing data, (mis-) categorisations, and flawed automated (and manual) results.
Published in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics journal's special topic, Network Analysis of Social Media Texts, our paper responds to calls from Big Data communication researchers for qualitative analysis of online science conversations to better explore their meaning. We identified a scholarly gap in the Science Communication field regarding the role that qualitative methods might play in researching small data regarding micro-bloggers' article communications. Although social media attention assists with academic article dissemination, qualitative research into related microblogging practices is scant. To support calls for the qualitative analysis of such communications, we provided a practical example:
Mixed methods were applied for better understanding an unorthodox, but popular, article (Diet, Diabetes Status, and Personal Experiences of Individuals with Type 2 diabetes Who Self-Selected and Followed a Low Carbohydrate High Fat diet) and its Twitter users' shares over two years. Big Data studies describe patterns in micro-bloggers' activities from large sets of data. In contrast, this small data set was analysed in NVivo™ by me (a pragmatist), and in MAXQDA™ by Corrie (a statistician). As part of the data preparation and cleaning, a comprehensive view of hyperlink sharing and conversations was developed, which quantitative extraction alone could not support. For example, through neglecting the general publication paths that fall outside listed academic publications, and related formal correspondence (such as academic letters, and sharing via open resources).
My multimodal content analysis found that links related to the article were largely shared by health professionals. Its popularity related to its position as a communication event within a longstanding debate in the Health Sciences. This issue arena sees an emergent Insulin Resistance (IR) paradigm contesting the dominant “cholesterol” model of chronic disease development. Health experts mostly shared this article, and their profiles reflected support for the emergent IR paradigm. We identified that these professionals followed a wider range of deliberation practices, than previously described by quantitative SciComm Twitter studies. Practices ranged from being included as part of a lecture-reading list, to language localisation in translating the article's title from English to Spanish, and study participants mentioning being involved. Contributing under their genuine identities, expert contributors carried the formal norms for civil communication into the scientific Twitter genre. There were no original URL shares from IR critics, suggesting how sharing evidence for an unconventional low-carbohydrate, healthy fats approach might be viewed as undermining orthodox identities. However, critics did respond with pro-social replies, and constructive criticism linked to the article's content, and its methodological limitations.
The statistician's semantic network analysis (SNA) confirmed that terms used by the article's tweeters related strongly to the article's content, and its discussion was pro-social. A few prominent IR individual advocates and organisations shared academic links to the article repeatedly, with its most influential tweeters and sharers being from England and South Africa. In using Atlas.ti and MAXQDA's tools for automated sentiment analysis, the statistician found many instances where sentiment was inaccurately described as negative when it should have been positive. This suggested a methodological limitation of quantitative approaches, such as QDAS, in (i) accurately analysing microblogging data. The SNA also uncovered concerns with (ii) incorrect automated counts for link shares. Concerns i & ii indicate how microblogging statistics may oversimplify complex categories, leading to inaccurate comparisons. In response, close readings of microblogging data present a distinct opportunity for meta-critique. Qualitative research can support critiques of microblogging data sources, as well as its use in QDAS. A lack of support for static Twitter data spreadsheet analysis was concerning.
Meta-inferences were then derived from the two methods' varied claims above. These findings flagged the importance of contextualising a health science article's sharing in relation to tweeters' professional identities and stances on what is healthy. In addition, meta-critiques spotlighted challenges with preparing accurate tweet data, and their analysis via qualitative data analysis software. Such findings suggest the valuable contributions that qualitative research can make to research with microblogging data in science communication.
The manuscript's development history
In 2020, Dr Pat Harpur and I selected an outlier IR scientific publication based on its unusually high Twitter popularity. At that time, the editorial, 'It is time to bust the myth of physical inactivity and obesity: you cannot outrun a bad diet' had been tweeted about over 3,000 times (now nearing 4,000 according to Altmetric!). However analysing this highly popular outlier stalled after its static export in qualitative data analysis software proved unsuitable for efficient coding. The large quantum of tweet data also proved very difficult to analyse. Accordingly, we shifted focus to a popular article that had been shared as an episode of a broader, long-running IR versus cholesterol debate. Even with its relatively small volume of tweets, organising this data for qualitative analysis proved challenging. For example, it was necessary to refine the Python extraction code, while cross-checks of static vs Twitter search results necessitated the capture of “missing” conversations.
We originally developed a multimodal analysis of these tweets, which focused on their relationship to Twitter user's profiles, potentially reflecting a wide range of communication goals. Our manuscript was submitted in 2022 to Science Communication, where Professor Susanna Priest kindly gave in-depth feedback on changing the original manuscript's contribution to a methodological one. We tackled this through developing a rationale for qualitative research with small data in the majorly revised article, which Dr Corrie Uys did a semantic network analysis for, while I revisited the social semiotic analysis.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns about our article, please comment below.
Acknowledgements
orcid.org/0000-0001-9566-8983
