Jay Bhattacharya, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, (mostly) correctly called out and decried YouTube for censoring and spiking a public-policy roundtable hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and in which Bhattacharya had participated.
Among other things discussed by the participants was the wisdom of requiring children to wear masks in the face of the Wuhan Virus situation. The panel said the requirement was foolish and counterproductive, and this was too much for the Know Betters. YouTube
removed the video “because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”
Bhattacharya, though, in his op-ed cited study after study supporting the panel’s position: requiring children to wear masks is deeply suboptimal, and is so across a wide range of dimensions.
Never mind.
Never mind that the panelists, in addition to Bhattacharya, who is a physician, economist, and Stanford Medical School professor, consisted of Sunetra Gupta, infectious disease epidemiologist and epidemiology professor at Oxford; Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Scott Atlas, radiologist, health care policy advisor, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. They’re only experts; they know nothing.
Their position is contrary to The Narrative. How dare anyone contradict Settled Narrative.
I said above “‘mostly’ correctly called out…YouTube” because YouTube is wholly owned by Google, and Google is wholly owned by Alphabet. The latter two are run by Sundar Pichai.
It is, in fact, Alphabet and Sundar Pichai who are peddling disinformation under the guise of preventing “misinformation,” using YouTube as the vehicle for their machination.
Once again, Pichai is pushing the Left’s Newspeak dictionary and doing so at the direct and deliberate expense of objective discourse.
This also is a prima facie case for treating Alphabet, et al., as public accommodations—or as common carriers—and limiting their ability to discriminate or to censor.