The Media Research Center has continued to push the narrative that there is no objective definition of misinformation, that it’s all subjective and partisan and “so-called.” Gabriela Pariseau huffed in an Aug. 19 post:
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told CBS This Morning host Gayle King that his platform has removed over 18 million pieces of so-called “misinformation,” but King appeared to want more. She pressed Zuckerberg to reveal how many people view the content before it is taken down.
Zuckerberg bragged to King about how much content his platform has removed: “We’ve taken down more than 18 million pieces of misinformation.” King praised the enormous number as “good” and said she thinks “everybody agrees that Facebook has done a lot to combat misinformation.” But she wanted to know how many people have “acted upon” the information viewed and shared. King then said that Facebook announced it has actually removed 20 million pieces of so-called “misinformation” after she conducted the interview.
Alexander Hall took it further by going full anti-vaxxer in a Sept. 29 post, declaring misinformation to be mere “dissent” and the fact that COVID vaccines are safe and effective as just “the left’s preferred narrative”:
Big Tech has been hard at work censoring content that runs afoul of the left’s preferred narrative on COVID-19. Now, YouTube is stepping things up a notch and will reportedly begin removing videos questioning any approved medical vaccine.
COVID-19 turned countless institutions into dystopian enforcers, and YouTube is no exception.
YouTube announced Sept. 29 that it will censor so-called “medical misinformation” concerning vaccinations. The new content purges will cover a wide array of vaccine skepticism: “Specifically, content that falsely alleges that approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects, claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease, or contains misinformation on the substances contained in vaccines will be removed.”
Hall did not explain why spreading deliberate misinformation is “dissent” instead of the lie that it is.
In an Oct. 12 post, Autumn Johnson declared that “Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that she wants more censorship from Big Tech giants like Facebook,” having “joined President Joe Biden and other liberals in calling for more censorship of so-called misinformation online.” Johnson went on to put “disinformation” in scare quotes despite offering no evidence that anything that Clinton identified as disinformation was not.
Hall used an Oct. 19 post to hype that Twitter “reportedly censored Grabien Founder and Editor Tom Elliot for questioning the COVID-19 narrative” — he offered no proof this was the case, only the ranting of other right-wing activists making the unsupported claim. Nevertheless, he added; “Big Tech has used COVID-19 as a carte-blanche excuse to restrict speech that they have deemed to be dangerous misinformation. Yet, at the same time, some of the tech giants have allowed actual dangerous propaganda from foreign powers.”
Catherine Salgado played the “so-called” card in an Oct. 27 post:
It’s not the first time a Big Tech executive bragged about censoring speech online, and it likely won’t be the last. A YouTube executive testified at a Senate hearing yesterday that the platform had removed more than one million videos for so-called COVID-19 “misinformation.”
YouTube Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy Leslie Miller testified at an Oct. 26 U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation hearing that the Google-owned platform had removed over a million videos with alleged “COVID misinfo,” including over 130,000 videos on “Covid vaccine misinfo.” The hearing was titled, “Protecting Kids Online: Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.”
Salgado went on to huff: “YouTube has repeatedly censored users for alleged COVID-19 ‘misinformation.’ YouTube censored a Hoover Institute doctor for challenging the COVID-19 narrative in September 2020.” That’s a reference to a video of onetime Trump COVID adviser (despite having no expertise in virology) Scott Atlas, which the MRC ranted about when it happened in September 2020. But the MRC censored the fact that the video did, in fact, contain documented misinformation; a YouTube spokesperson pointed out that Atlas’ video contained a statement “disputing existing international and local health authority guidance by falsely stating that a certain age group cannot transmit the virus.”