Dan Gainor of Media Research Center say it has accumulated 880 examples of Big Tech censorship that probably “barely scratched the surface” of online censorship after two years of the virus pandemic.
An MRC campaign called “Free Speech America” tallied the 800-plus examples from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other powerful and influential websites. Those websites punished everyone from medical doctors to politicians for posting “misinformation” about COVID-19 such as the benefits and risks of vaccines, and even the origins of the virus itself.
And where did that censorship come from? Facebook and other websites were scolded by the Biden administration to “get a handle” on what it called “vaccine misinformation" that was spreading like the virus, CNN reported last summer. That story described “tense” meetings with White House staff and Facebook executives over Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist. He had been kicked off Instagram months earlier but not from Facebook, which owns Instagram, and the White House demanded to know why.
Gainor tells American Family News much of what was obediently banned as false and misleading has turned out to be true. That’s because Big Tech was willing to act like an all-knowing “mom and dad” for the public instead of a platform for differing views, he says.
A reminder about the 'monsters'
Now, as 2022 gets started, much of the public is watching as the accepted narrative and “the science” are shifting before our eyes from the same politicians and news outlets that accused fellow Americans of being unpatriotic for refusing The Jab; dangerous for re-opening schools and businesses; selfish for refusing a mask; and un-Christian for holding church services. An MRC video compilation about the shifting view on cloth masks, which can be viewed here, shows how news outlets such as CNN and MSNBC shifted from assuring the public they were protected by them to dismissing them as all but useless.
“And there's been no declaration of change of science,” Gainor says. “It's simply change of policy.”
Reacting to the shifting narrative, which happened virtually overnight, the near-universal conclusion from the Right is the panicking Left realizes Election Day is coming.
"Democrats are dropping mask mandates based on new data: polling data, not medical," Todd Starnes, the radio show host, quipped in a Twitter post.
A related reaction from the Right is to not simply move on as if the past two years --- the "pandemic of the unvaccinated," as President Biden called 80 million Americans last fall --- did not happen.
Drew Holden, a freelance newspaper columnist, pointed out this week that CNN medical analyst Leana Wen was asking for the public to "move from vitriol and divisiveness" regarding the virus pandemic. That won't happen, he said. The same person, he pointed out, was suggesting children should wear medical masks in schools just weeks ago.
Even worse than that, Wen had suggested that unvaccinated people should be forced to stay home, radio show host Jesse Kelly pointed out.
Even if all the COVID restrictions are lifted tomorrow, Kelly wrote, the people who "brought back segregation over a virus," and denied lifesaving medical treatment to sick and dying Americans, are still here and deserve a "reckoning" for what they did.
Kelly was reacting after asking the public to post their personal stories of how the pandemic affected them and their families, which he later read on his radio show.
That heartbreaking thread, which generated hundreds of stories, can be read here.
"Don't forget," he wrote on Twitter, "who the monsters are."
Gainor says the public should not forget that it was Big Tech that willingly went along with censoring views that weren’t allowed. If it happened before, he says, it can happen again.
“Parents, I guess you could say, are benign dictators," he says. "Big Tech is not benign.”
