A new series of bombshell revelations about Twitter surfaced on the social media platform on Thursday when independent journalist Bari Weiss detailed a wide range of accounts that had been prevented from trending under the company’s previous management.
After acquiring Twitter earlier this year, Elon Musk promised to reveal troubling details about how voices were stealthily silenced, and Weiss’ thread provided the latest round of such information.
One of the accounts put on a so-called “trends blacklist” belongs to Stanford University professor of medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who has been critical of certain COVID-19 mitigation measures.
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. pic.twitter.com/qTW22Zh691
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Specifically, he has been adamant in expressing concerns about the impact of widespread lockdowns on childhood development.
In the wake of the latest revelations about his Twitter account, Bhattacharya appeared on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle” to express his belief that such behavior had a deleterious effect on “scientific discussion” surrounding pandemic-era mandates.
“It feels like some novel from the 1950s, where the House Un-American [Activities] Committee is meeting to decide who to suppress and I’m some sort of movie star … in Hollywood that they’re blacklisting because I’m a communist or something.”
The professor went on to tell host Laura Ingraham that the platform’s move “harmed science, harmed children, and harmed the American public.”
Had Twitter and other outlets allowed an honest debate of the issues surrounding the global health crisis, Bhattacharya said he is confident that many aspects of the response would have been handled differently.
“If we had an open discussion, Laura, the schools would not have closed in the fall of 2020,” he concluded. “If we’d had an open discussion, the lockdowns would have been lifted much earlier because the data and evidence behind them was so bad. Twitter, by suppressing scientific discussion harmed science, harmed children, and harmed the American public.”
Bhattacharya believes that the White House played a pivotal role in directing outlets like Twitter to essentially censor information contrary to its position on COVID-19. He told Ingraham that he was involved in a lawsuit against the Biden administration, asserting that the process has “uncovered tremendous evidence” of the federal government’s complicity.
