Tech Censorship Is Now a Public Health Hazard

Check out this post from Breitbart The Democrats and their progressive allies in Silicon Valley and the mainstream media have spent the last two decades convincing themselves that they are the “party of science.” In their frantic panic to censor material related to the Chinese virus, we’re now seeing the dangerous outcome of that hubris. You would think that the doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, ranked as the eighth-best hospital in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, knows a bit more about medicine than the blue-haired censors at YouTube. But the YouTube censors are convinced they know better, recently censoring a video from AYTU BioScience about “Healight,” an experimental UV light treatment the company is developing as a potential treatment for the coronavirus in partnership with a team at Cedars-Sinai. AYTU BioScience is a Colorado-based pharmaceutical company publicly traded on the NASDAQ exchange that has developed a wide range of successful drugs. You’d think they know a thing or two about medicine. But again, YouTube appears to disagree. After all, Silicon Valley’s masters in the mainstream media insist that UV light treatment, mentioned by the president, must be dangerous, wrong, and only advocated by “conspiracy theorists.” In an exceptionally dishonest headline, Bloomberg Technology wrote that AYTU “sees an opportunity” in Trump’s comments on the treatment, even though the company and Cedars-Sinai had been investigating UV light treatment well before the president made his remarks. Of course, UV light treatment is still in the early stages of research — if successful, the results will be published in medical journals, which doctors tend to pay more attention to than YouTube or NBC. Nevertheless, the censorship is still a problem — it stifles creative discussion around potential areas of research, and makes information about those area of research harder to find. As we know from Breitbart’s past reporting, YouTube is happy to take censorship cues from the mainstream media. In 2019, the company altered its search results for the term “abortion” within hours of receiving a complaint by a left-wing Slate writer. The censorship of AYTU is just one example of Silicon Valley’s coronavirus overreach. YouTube has also censored a video of two doctors in Bakersfield, California, who recommended an early end to the nationwide shutdowns. Facebook has branded anti-lockdown protests “misinformation” whose organizers will be banned, and has censored a video from Project Veritas containing remarks from officials at a testing center in New York, as well as videos from Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro discussing the need to balance addressing the pandemic with averting economic disaster. Twitter also banned Bolsonaro’s videos, as well as a post from Fox News host Laura Ingraham discussing hydroxychloroquine. The platform says it will ban coronavirus-related claims that cause “harmful activity,” whatever that means. And let’s not forget that Chinese internet censorship, which helped prevent information about the coronavirus from getting out in the first place, takes place with the assistance of American technology companies. Scarcely four months ago, the world was largely unaware of the Wuhan coronavirus. And yet, Silicon Valley believes it — or the media, or bureaucrats (who can’t make up their mind on whether we should wear masks or not) — has all the answers. This is scientifically illiterate. Doctors and scientists aren’t known for agreeing with each other, and they especially aren’t known for agreeing with each other when so little is known about the virus. Scientists in New York say that smoking raises the risk of severe coronavirus symptoms. Scientists in France say that smoking might actually help the body fight coronavirus symptoms. Who’s right? We don’t know — especially because there’s barely been time to carry out tests. In the world of science and medicine, what matters is not consensus, but rather testing that follows the scientific method and reproducible results. But surely there are some quacks who should never be listened to? No doubt, but I challenge you to find a method for identifying them. Silicon Valley’s method appears to be: do what the mainstream media says, regardless of their woeful track record of fake news. But even the “medical establishment” (if such a thing exists, given that doctors disagree about almost everything) can get it wrong. The ideas of Joseph Lister, the Victorian pioneer of antiseptic surgical techniques, were roundly mocked by the medical establishment of the day, including the world’s most prestigious medical journal, The Lancet.  It’s not hard to see why Lister was denounced. After all, he proposed pouring caustic acid on wounds! That sounds as crazy as using UV light, which can cause skin cancer and strokes, as a medical cure. And yet today, antiseptic treatments are taught in every medical textbook. And what about Edward Jenner, the inventor of the first-ever vaccine, the one that eliminated smallpox? The establishment today love to tout their pro-vaccine credentials, but the establishment of Jenner’s day wasn’t so sure. The Royal Society, the leading scientific society in the world at the time, initially declined to publish Jenner’s paper explaining his research. And it wasn’t until 1840 — more than four decades after Jenner began his research — that the British government rolled out his smallpox vaccines nationwide. No doubt there were more than a few people at the time who thought that Jenner’s vaccine — which involved injecting children with pus from diseased cows — sounded insane and dangerous. And yet, without the Jenner vaccine, billions of lives would have been otherwise lost to smallpox. Now, consider this: what if, in Lister and Jenner’s day, all information was controlled by a handful of technology companies that did whatever the establishment told them? Would they have been banned as crackpots and snake-oil salesmen? It’s highly likely. From the Georgian doctor who thought injecting children with a cow virus would be a neat idea, to the 19th-century surgeon who thought to throw acid on wounds to clean them, “crackpots” have been behind more scientific and medical advances than the establishment would care to admit. The only question is, how many cures will be stopped or delayed by Silicon Valley hyper-censorship, with its insufferable insistence that every truth and every fact is already known? Are you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com. Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.

YOUTUBE’S CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER INSULTS HIS OWN USERS AS BASEMENT-DWELLING IDIOTS

Admits company rigs its algorithm to favor mainstream media.

YouTube’s Chief Product Officer has insulted his own users as basement-dwellers who deserve to be relegated by the algorithm in favor of “authoritative” mainstream sources. Neil Mohan made the remarks during an interview with Protocol’s editor at large David Pierce after he was asked if YouTube had to switch its approach to moderating content given the ever changing advice of health authorities in relation to the coronavirus. Mohan said that this was the reason YouTube was “raising up authoritative voices,” which is a euphemism for suppressing voices that aren’t part of the mainstream media, despite the fact that the public’s trust in the media during the coronavirus pandemic has plummeted even further. He then went on to insult his own user base as basement-dwelling idiots. “As opposed to, you know, it’s somebody espousing their opinions about a mask, you know, in their basement,” said Mohan. “This is coming from an authoritative channel, a news source, a medical professional, and if that’s the case, we think there’s going to be some context that’s provided around the question of masks. And even if that guidance changes, it will be reflected in sort of how an authoritative voice or channel talks about it.” Mohan then made it clear how non-mainstream channels are algorithmically shadow banned by “removing or reducing views of the videos where that same level of authority hasn’t been established.” Of course, the only reason why so-called “authoritative” sources are now doing so well on YouTube is because the company rigged its own algorithm to heavily favor them while dumping the very people who helped build YouTube on the trash heap. Last month, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki recently said that information which challenged the World Health Organization would be removed, despite the fact that the WHO was directly complicit in helping China cover-up the severity of coronavirus in its early stages and despite the fact the organization gave harmful advice in ordering countries not to close their borders early on. “Mohan’s comments exemplify how the changes YouTube has made in relation to the coronavirus and news coverage have made it almost impossible for independent creators to cover current events, even when the mainstream media outlets that are being raised up have a track record of getting it wrong,” writes Tom Parker.