Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: The Deadly Consequences of Censorship and the Need For COVID Commissions - February 25, 2023

American Thought Leaders - JAN JEKIELEK

I sit down with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration that argued for focused protection of the vulnerable—instead of large-scale lockdowns.

“Many people that are dead today would be alive, had we been allowed to make that argument,” Bhattacharya says.

We discuss how Big Tech, his university, and the highest levels of the federal bureaucracy worked to silence him and other scientists.

Last December, he was invited by Elon Musk to visit Twitter headquarters and see how he was censored. “I was actually placed on the blacklist the very day I joined Twitter,” he says.

After years of destructive pandemic policies, what is the path forward? How do we prevent the same policies from being adopted the next time there’s a respiratory virus pandemic?

https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-jay-bhattacharya-the-deadly-consequences-of-censorship_5082966.html

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Leaked government documents reveal that U.S. government officials have access to a special portal - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23129270-fb-portal - through which they can directly flag Facebook and Instagram posts and request that the posts be “throttled or suppressed,” The Intercept reported Monday.

Internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memos, emails and public documents outline “an expansive effort” by DHS to influence tech platforms, despite the Biden administration’s failure earlier this year to launch a Disinformation Governance Board.

As of Oct. 31, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login was still live despite the public uproar earlier this year when attorneys general in 20 states threatened legal action unless the Biden administration immediately disbanded the “Orwellian” Disinformation Governance Board.

Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, told The Defender that collusion between the U.S. government and media companies to censor U.S. citizens is nothing new — but it’s become a “catastrophic trend.”

Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” told The Defender:

“The Intercept’s reporting validates what many knew was being undertaken by the Department of Homeland Security, despite the scrapping of its Disinformation Governance Board.”

Rectenwald said the coordination between government and media companies validates his claim that social media companies are not merely “private companies” but are “state and uni-party apparatuses” — what he has called “governmentalities” — that “augment the state by adding precision, scope, and penetration to state power.”

Indeed, many of the people in charge of moderating content at Facebook have been recruited from the government, including the CIA, FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense.

“The unholy alliance between the state and these corporations has historically been called fascism,” Rectenwald added.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/homeland-security-social-media-censorship/?itm_term=home

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The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been hosting meetings with internet platforms and allowing those platforms to flag for deletion any material to which they object. This until now secret program resulted in the federal bureaucracy meddling in the 2020 elections.

You can read the whole 48 pages of minutes at https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23175380/dhs-cybersecurity-disinformation-meeting-minutes.pdf

The documents were obtained by Missouri Attorney General and Republican Senate candidate Eric Schmitt as part of an investigation he is conducting. The left-wing site The Intercept did the initial reporting.

The Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation Subcommittee meetings began during the 2020 election. That means it was organized and operated under President Donald Trump’s appointees in an organization he created in 2018.

In coordination with this committee, Facebook developed a web portal where “partners” can identify material that the “partner” doesn’t want distributed, and Facebook will see to taking it down or making it nearly impossible to share. The portal, facebook.com/xtakedowns/login, was in operation as I wrote this.

By streiff | 7:00 PM on October 31, 2022
https://redstate.com/streiff/2022/10/31/leaked-documents-show-dhs-the-fbi-and-social-media-platforms-worked-together-to-stop-debate-on-covid-hunters-laptop-and-election-integrity-n652011