Prodded by feds, media to police COVID dissent, Big Tech finds consistent standards elusive

Aug 26, 2022 | Political News

Under pressure from federal officials and mainstream media to apply a rigid lens to ever-evolving scientific research, Big Tech companies are flailing in their efforts to treat contested claims consistently.

Twitter blamed an overactive spam filter for wrongly suspending a U.K. doctor who started a project to audit the country's COVID-19 deaths and was previously censored by YouTube for explaining the results of Pfizer's COVID vaccine trial for young children in layman's terms.

The explanation suggests that even as Twitter implements election misinformation rules ahead of the fall midterms, it may be wary of continuing to aggressively police “misleading” COVID tweets in the wake of the CDC's drastic revision of COVID guidance and ongoing publishing of its internal communications related to censorship.