More revelations about how government officials pressured Big Tech to clamp down on free speech, underscoring the urgency behind our FreeSpeech4Health campaign. Action Alert!
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THE TOPLINE
- A House Congressional Committee has released a scathing report that provides further detail on the government’s censorship campaign during COVID.
- Big Tech and Big Government are waging a war on the First Amendment, censoring health information that wavers from the party line, as dictated by the CDC and the WHO.
- This report underscores the necessity of our FreeSpeech4Health campaign—sign our petition now!
Information that could improve your health, even save your life, is being wiped by content moderators or shadowbanned—manipulated by algorithms so it doesn’t appear in searches or suggested content. This only stands to get much worse, unless we do something about it.
Last week, the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on the “censorship industrial complex” and released a scathing report that digs deeper into the disturbing collusion between Big Tech giants like Facebook, Google, and YouTube and government officials to censor content on the internet that the Biden Administration did not like. The nearly 900-page report expands upon many of the revelations from the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case we reported on last week.
This censorship industrial complex took shape when the Biden Administration pressured social media platforms to censor content that was viewed as negatively impacting the uptake of COVID vaccines. This wide net caught everything from information about alternatives (like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, as well as natural medicines like vitamin D, zinc, and quercetin) to information about the risks and side effect profile of novel mRNA vaccines.
Since COVID, however, the censorship industrial complex has expanded into other areas of health. After YouTube changed its medical misinformation policy to disallow content that is not in alignment with the dictates of the CDC or the World Health Organization, there is evidence that information about the health benefits of ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting is being shadowbanned, which is why we’ve launched our FreeSpeech4Health campaign and petition.
Much of what we know about the censorship industrial complex is a result of the Murthy case and the “Twitter files” that were released when Elon Musk bought the company (now X). But now Congress has gotten involved. The Committee on Judiciary issued dozens of subpoenas to Big Tech, government agencies, and others, gaining access to a trove of internal emails between the highest levels of leadership in these companies.
Here’s a taste of what the Committee found:
- In September 2021, after receiving months of criticism for not censoring nonviolative content, YouTube shared with the Biden White House a new “policy proposal” to censor more content criticizing the safety and efficacy of vaccines, asking for “any feedback” the White House could provide before the policy had been finalized. The White House gushed: “at first blush, seems like a great step.”
- Internal July 2021 Facebook emails obtained by the Committee and Select Subcommittee show that Facebook understood that the Biden White House’s position as wanting “negative information on or opinions about the vaccine” removed as well as “humorous or satirical content that suggests the vaccine isn’t safe.”
- The same set of emails also noted that “The Surgeon General wants us to remove true information about side effects.”
You know you’ve reached George Orwell territory when government health officials want “true information” about a medicine’s side effects to be censored—a medicine that same government is pushing the entire population to receive.
Help us take a stand against the growing climate of censorship and suppression of free speech by signing our petition, which calls on YouTube to change its medical misinformation policy to one that serves public health, not corporate interests.
