patrick.net

In a recent viral video, a group of health professionals calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” advocated for the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

Facebook and Twitter, the two most widely used social media platforms, have both been removing and censoring any mention of the video, flagging it as “false information.”

In doing so, these tech giants are deciding which board-certified experts deserve public visibility and which experts don’t.

Twitter and Facebook are fully willing to share the opinions of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention despite the fact that both public health organizations have been wildly inconsistent with their findings on the coronavirus.

At one point, the CDC said that American’s don’t need masks, but now the organization has changed its mind. CDC Director Robert Redfield had even told a House committee in February that “There is no role for these masks in the community,” according to MarketWatch.

The WHO defended China on multiple occasions and said that the country had handled the public health crisis well despite the fact that multiple reports suggest the Chinese government went to great lengths to cover up the outbreak. One peer-reviewed study even found that 95 percent of COVID-19 infections could have been prevented if only China had acted sooner. ...

A handful of large tech companies — including Facebook and Twitter — with proven track records of engaging in political bias shouldn’t act as informational gatekeepers; they shouldn’t get to decide which opinions the American people get to hear. ...

Nonetheless, these tech giants and others have made it clear for months now that, when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, they are fully willing to silence anyone with a dissenting opinion, no matter their level of expertise.

In an April interview with CNN, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that the video-sharing platform would be removing any content that contradicted the WHO’s coronavirus guidelines, as if no reputable medical authorities could ever possibly disagree with that organization.

“Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy and so remove is another really important part of our policy,” Wojcicki said.

In times of great uncertainty when people are turning to big tech and social media to get their information, letting a group of Silicon Valley elites decide which voices should be heard and which should be silenced sets a dangerous precedent.

Americans — indeed, all people everywhere — deserve to hear from all of the experts, not just those approved by liberal Silicon Valley elitists.