Twitter recently reinstated ZeroHedge after permanently banning the website back on January 31. ZeroHedge had been running stories based on Chinese reports about a biolab in Wuhan being the source of the coronavirus outbreak along with videos and comments from Chinese social media that showed that the epidemic was much worse than claimed by authorities.
The alleged basis for the ban was publicizing the webpage for a scientist at the lab with questions if he was involved in the release of virus. Zerohedge has continued to report on the growing evidence of the lab origin of the virus in spite of the ban.
At the time, the mainstream media was frothing about the ongoing impeachment trial. President Trump instituted a travel ban from China the same day, an action that Joe Biden and many in the media roundly criticized as hysteria and xenophobia. The mainstream media was generally ignoring the growing epidemic other than to repeat pronouncements from WHO and the Chinese government as the sole basis for “facts”.
Do you think that the Twitter ban was an attempt to prevent investigations and commentary that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government? Has this been a case of speaking truth to power?
Or is it just been a misunderstanding as Twitter claims?
Not exactly. NIH funded work starting in 2014 to study bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan Lab. They also funded gain-of-function work in Wuhan starting in 2019. Gain-of-function work is suspected of creating the COVID-19 coronavirus.
The stories now appear in the mainstream media, but the Twitter banned ZeroHedge for running similar stories back in January.
Was Twitter’s ban ZeroHedge an example of censorship?
If so was it to protect China? Or to avoid distractions of the impeachment? Or some other reason?
Simple, someone in China said, “Shut them down”.
There’s absolutely no evidence to suggest it was created in a lab but the evidence continues to mount that they Isolated it several years ago and were working with it when a worker became infected at the lab and released it then to the general population via normal exposure and that China has known this all along; since at least Dec/Early Jan if not sooner.
Internal documents from Google shows that it has abandoned the First Amendment approach to freedom of speech and endorsed censorship of opinions it finds offensive. Google terminated development of a special censored web browser for the China market (dragonfly) in 2019. Is it instead bringing that approach to the US in an attempt to swing the election against Trump?
Is ZeroHedge’s “crime” simply reporting from a different point of view?
My understanding is that Google’s action hits ZeroHedge’s ad revenue. Google controls a large share of the placement of advertising on the internet.
I assume ZeroHedge may still appear in Google searches, but Google typically puts conservative sites at the bottom of the search list.
It looks like “Googling” now means getting censored and shafted by a huge evil empire.
I really don’t think that’s a new thing with them. If you want to see a conservative source on a story you often have to go through many left wing and mainstream left sites before you get there.
It would be hard to see how banning them for what happens in the comment section. About every video on YouTube has vile comments in the comment sections.
