Back in the bad old days of Covid-19, Trump supporters and others on the right were furious at the way the social-media companies had censored posts by scientists—such as Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya—who dared to dissent from the conventional wisdom about fighting the pandemic. They were right to be enraged.
On Twitter (now known as X), Bhattacharya, who is now both director of the NIH and interim head of the CDC, was put on a Trends Blacklist, which radically suppressed the visibility of his posts. YouTube, which is owned by Google, censored a video of a roundtable in Florida during which Bhattacharya suggested—correctly—that the scientific evidence for masking children was weak. Kulldorff was banned from LinkedIn in 2022, and Facebook removed a page devoted to the Great Barrington Declaration, a clear-eyed but dissident document co-authored by Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University.
