Prior to COVID all the major platforms put limits on free speech. But in most cases the censorship was on edge cases, rarely effecting the average user. It’s hard to remember a time when the average user could generally express an opinion without much fear of getting silenced, but such a time did in fact exist.

Prominent accounts did get shadowbanned, of course, but it was sporadic. When COVID emerged, so did systemic speech policing.

During COVID all bets were off. The “misinformation” label could be liberally applied based on the accusation that dissent from the prevailing narrative risked lives. The Science™ was said to be an objective standard, so quashing dissent was clearly seen as a positive social good. Lives were being “saved!” At least that was the excuse.

David Zweig, reporting for Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, was tasked with wading through the voluminous evidence of the relationship between the government and Twitter regarding censoring COVID information.

2. So far the Twitter Files have focused on evidence of Twitter’s secret blacklists; how the company functioned as a kind of subsidiary of the FBI; and how execs rewrote the platform’s rules to accommodate their own political desires.

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

The COVID “emergency” enabled both the government and the social media companies to accomplish what was once only imaginable: trolling through average and not-so-average Americans’ social media posts and choosing what could be said and what couldn’t.

Censorship was not limited to edge cases, but to any speech that deviated from the accepted line. And it wasn’t only average citizens who were silenced, but bona fide experts in their fields whose opinions differed in even modest ways from the government’s interpretation of first COVID policy and eventually anything. Some of the most prominent members of the medical and public health fields were silenced for the sin of disagreeing with Fauci and company.

Zweig’s revelations are in some ways the most important of the lot–not just because COVID was the most important topic of the day and scientific and policy debates were squelched–but because the COVID censorship regime directly led to the aggressive censorship that eventually encompassed all types of speech.

Stopping COVID “misinformation” saved lives; stopping political “misinformation” saved Democracy itself. How very high minded!

As an advocate of free speech up to but not including incitement I object in principle to suppressing almost any form of speech, but in principle I don’t think a Twitter policy prohibiting harassment or even gross incivility is incompatible with allowing the free flow of ideas. It is easily possible, even in the age of Twitter, to vigorously debate without dropping the F bomb.

But dropping the F-bomb on Twitter was always OK. I like to joke that Twitter is a sewer with diamonds strew into the muck. Finding the diamonds means wading through tons of excrement. Twitter never banned the excrement–it went after the diamonds that belonged to the unapproved.

The vilest sort of language is routinely allowed on Twitter, and vile harassment is commonplace if directed at the “wrong” sort of people. What was not allowed was actual dissent from the government approved narrative.

5. Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @thefp showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

That second point is vital to understand. The impulse to censor speech in the name of the social good is common to all governments, not just Left-leaning ones. While it is impossible to overstate how overrun the government is with Left-leaning bureaucrats and thus easy to underestimate how even under Trump much of the censorship came from the Left, it is also easy to overestimate the difference between Left-authoritarians and Right-authoritarians.

Most people in government, given the opportunity to shut people up, will take it. Not every request from the Trump Administration came from the bowels of the bureaucracy. People far up the chain of command seem to have been at least OK with censoring dissent, which is a good reminder that protecting freedom requires vigilance regardless of who is in power. Power corrupts.

7. It wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. pic.twitter.com/OgOrRxBBBW

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

Early on the willingness to censor facts that were indisputably true but inconvenient was evident. “Runs on grocery stores” weren’t “conspiracy theories” by any stretch of the imagination. Anybody who shopped during the initial months on COVID remembers stores running out of staples such as toilet paper, pasta, rice, and any number of other goods. Suppressing panic about such realities can clearly be justified in people’s minds as promoting a social good–but once that excuse is accepted there can be no limiting principle.

Truth itself became no defense. Arbitrary decisions about the social good were made at high levels and low, including contractors in the Philippines given lists of things to suppress. An ill-educated army of censors trolled through Twitter banning people high and low. A minimum wage worker could silence a Harvard epidemiologist for the public good.

Anything one likes can be argued to be a social good, and in a closed group where dissent is rare any shared opinion can be labeled as promoting the good. Such as getting rid of political leaders who are seen as dangerous by the group. Which is, of course, what this drive to suppress discussion led to.

“Misinformation” became synonymous with disagreement with government officials. The Science™ became Anthony Fauci’s whimsical opinions. “Facts” and “misinformation” changed by the day sometimes, as when Twitter banned discussion of COVID’s origins until the day Anthony Fauci admitted that there might be some truth to the theory of a viral escape from the WIV. Suddenly discussing the possibility was no long conspiracy theorizing, due to the musings of one man.

The Trump Administration’s efforts to suppress dissent were modest compared to Biden’s. What tended to be requests under Trump became near demands under Biden. Not covered in Zweig’s reporting (so far) is the simultaneous public statements by the Biden Administration that social media companies’ failure to suppress unapproved speech could lead to far more direct government regulation. To this day Democrats regularly bring up the possibility of investigations and new regulations intended to force social media companies to suppress “misinformation.”

Angry demands behind the scenes were accompanied by angry threats in public. What is a strong request becomes a command in such a context. The president himself suggested that Elon Musk–after buying Twitter–might be a national security threat. Any “suggestion” for censorship under such a threat hardly counts as anything but a demand. This is government censorship, pure and simple.

12. Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was “very angry” that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more. pic.twitter.com/lZTQV3yKeZ

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

One irony regarding COVID censorship was how arbitrary it was. Prominent, even world-class scientists were silenced by barely educated contractors for the company. Their only criterion was deviance from the accepted Narrative. And once the censorship of purely political speech became routine a few executives could take it upon themselves to suspend an entire newspaper with national reach for reporting the inconvenient facts that their preferred presidential candidate’s son was corrupt, and likely funneling foreign money to his father.

They simply labeled true information “misinformation,” and changed an election.

Suppressing speech for the “public good” serves the public badly. There are some who admit that Twitter was arbitrary in its suppression of speech, but that clamping down on “misinformation” is still a public good.

I dissent from that idea. Nobody has a monopoly on the truth, and obviously false information gets debunked over time. Nobody believes the moon is made of green cheese, and no amount of argument that it does will persuade many. And as for “quack” treatments for COVID or other medical “misinformation,” you need go no farther than early CDC and NIAID press releases to find lots of misinformation about COVID.

People may not recall, but Nancy Pelosi and Mayor DeBlasio both encouraged people to mingle when COVID arrived, based upon no authority other than Donald Trump’s suggestion that people don’t. Twitter would never have suppressed their suggestions. Early warnings against masks were replaced by mask mandates–from the same authorities. More dissent, not less, would have served the public well.

Lots of damage was done due to suppressing dissent. Schools may have opened earlier, learning loss would have been less, and even political disagreements might have been tamped down due to more ambiguity in the received wisdom. Authorities, as much as anyone, drove anger.

The “cure” for misinformation is worse than the disease. Persuasion, not suppression, is the genuine cure. It may appear messier, but it provokes far less anger and suspicion.

And in the case of both COVID and political censorship, that anger is justified.