Twitter is censoring medical research about COVID

What do Medscape, Forbes, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and The New Yorker all have in common?

They’re all sources of medical research that Twitter is censoring.

Medscape is a well trusted website that publishes content from medical journals. According to Wikipedia:

“Medscape is a website providing access to medical information for clinicians; the organization also provides continuing education for physicians and health professionals. It references medical journal articles, Continuing Medical Education (CME), a version of the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE database, medical news, and drug information. At one time Medscape published seven electronic peer reviewed journals.”

Forbes is the very well known business news publication that publishes some pro-Wall Street propaganda, but also publishes some excellent cybersecurity news (that’s my industry), and some also excellent medical research.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is exactly as it sounds. It’s the top medical organization for children’s health in the United States. Their publications, including the flagship Pediatrics can be found here.

The New Yorker is the magazine working class and middle class white Americans use to appear culturally sophisticated and a couple of socioeconomic levels higher than they actually are. I know them for bringing The Addams Family to the world. But they also publish some good science content from time to time.

Now, onto the censorship!

I first became aware of Twitter’s censorship of scientific research about COVID early yesterday. I belong to a Direct Message group on Twitter where us “radical zero COVID zealots” hang out. @white_bite had a good tweet on August 14th about some of the awful consequences of Long COVID in children. She’s an oral pathologist. Twitter put her in “Twitter jail” and demanded that she delete her tweet. She shared her screenshots in our DM group.

As yesterday went on, I became aware of even more Twitter COVID information censorship.

One is from Farid Jalali MD, a respected medical doctor on Twitter who’s been vocal about the horrors of the pandemics. A screenshot was tweeted by another respected anti-COVID medical doctor, Denise Dewald MD.

Taylor Lorenz is a technology columnist for the Washington Post, and she did a whole thread about it yesterday evening.

But, bots make mistakes sometimes!

Very often, the content moderation bots on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and so on do falsely flag posts as violations due to the quirks of AI and its algorithms. But this isn’t just a bunch of false positives from bots.

This has been going on for long enough, to enough high profile and verified accounts, with enough engagement from verified account journalists, that the humans of Twitter moderation would have intervened by now if this was all in error.

This is all very deliberate by the humans of Twitter.

And even if it wasn’t, algorithms aren’t fair and neutral, no matter how much the Silicon Valley tech bros scream otherwise. Human beings design those algorithms. From Algorithm Watch:

“Myth:

Because an algorithm is nothing but a set of instructions that is applied to data — that usually comes in the form of numbers — it can contain no bias or prejudice that would have an influence on the outcome produced by using the algorithm.

Busted:

Algorithms are designed by humans; so are algorithmic decision making systems — from network management that favours certain forms of content over others (net neutrality) to ‘AI’ that is supposed to automatically distinguish hate speech, disinformation or terrorist propaganda from journalism, parody and other forms of legitimate content. All of these systems use value judgments to arrive at their results: To perform its task, an algorithm needs to ‘know’ what data package to treat differently from

others, what criteria define a certain mode of expression. Leaving the question aside whether algorithms will ever be able to assess speech correctly (they will not), it is obvious that such definitions are always developed by human beings with certain intentions. We would not qualify these definitions as neutral, and neither is the algorithm that acts on their basis.

A benevolent reading of the myth is that algorithms subject all inputs to the same set of instructions and therefore act indiscriminately, and that they do not have any intentions of their own. This is true, but obviously beside the point.

With regard to so-called machine-learning techniques, another aspect comes into play. When algorithms are trained by feeding them with large data sets in order for them to identify patterns and ‘learn’ from them (so-called ‘training data’), then it needs to be understood that these data sets usually contain biases that are inherent in human society. If a self-learning system draws conclusions on the basis of biased data, these conclusions will generally be biased, too, and therefore not neutral.

Truth

Algorithms are either directly designed by humans or, if self-learning, develop their logic on the basis of human-controlled and -designed processes. They are neither ‘objective’ nor ‘neutral’ but outcomes of human deliberation and power struggles.”

So, why is Twitter doing this?

Although I don’t have concrete evidence, here’s my solid hunch.

The powers-that-be don’t like pandemic mitigation. Discouraging people from indoor dining, clubbing, cruise ships, recreational travel, and so on is very inconvenient for capitalism. As is remote work. Because although a lot of jobs can be done from home (I work from home as a cybersecurity researcher and writer) and although people who work from home are more productive (see here) than if they were forced to go to the cubicle farm, it’s very difficult to micromanage people who work from home. Some employers try by putting spyware on their workers’ endpoints. But even with malicious camera access, there’s no substitute for many of these folks better than being able to interfere with white collar workers directly. Plus, office tower owners need their commercial real estate bucks!

The truth about the COVID pandemic, the monkeypox pandemic, the upcoming polio pandemic, and other pandemics is inconvenient to capitalism in the short term. Even as killing or permanently disabling a large segment of the population will be inconvenient to capitalism in the long term. These fat cats don’t think beyond next quarterly profits. Your life and my life and the lives of children, eldery people, and disabled people are disposable to them. They need to climb higher on the Forbes list, and yacht remodelling doesn’t come for free.

And why the crackdown on masks and respirators? Easy. They remind people that pandemics are going on. That’s not good for the Consumer Confidence Index!

I’m angry for people who have been infected by no choice of their own. Children, McDonald’s workers, people in long term care homes, medical workers, the list goes on. But to the reckless hordes who must have their maskless indoor dining and their Defcon and Blackhat events in Las Vegas, I have no tears for them. You assholes are facilitating this mass disabling event, leaving human lives in your wake. F**k you.

On a slightly more positive note, I look forward to Taylor Lorenz’s upcoming article.