> the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects
Jay Battacharya[1][2] of the Great Barrington Declaration fame - is he a usual case? From [3]:
> In October 2020, Collins criticized the Great Barrington Declaration's "focused protection" herd immunity strategy, calling it "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment." In a private email to Fauci, Collins called the authors of the declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and said that "There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises". The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accused Collins of "work[ing] with the media to trash the Great Barrington Declaration." and of "Shut[ting] Down Covid Debate".
Here's a bit more from the WSJ article[4] mentioned:
> In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.
From a recent interview in Unherd[5]:
> And this all began when you joined Twitter in August 2021, many months after you had signed the “Great Barrington Declaration” speaking against lockdowns and calling for an alternative approach to the pandemic.
> That first day in August 2021 when I joined Twitter, apparently Twitter received a number of unspecified complaints about me. It’s not clear, from my time at Twitter headquarters, exactly from who. Their systems are not set up to answer that question very easily, although apparently people are looking into that. And that then induced Twitter to put me on this trends blacklist to make sure that my tweets didn’t reach a broad audience outside of my own network… It took somebody at Twitter — a human at Twitter had to think about it. The setting was then renewed repeatedly through 2021 and 2022.
Maybe deplatforming is not the same as having your Twitter account meddled with but it seems similar enough. There's also Martin Kulldorf[6][7]:
> Was Martin Kulldorff also on the Trends Blacklist?
> He had been, actually. His first placement on the trends blacklist was in July of 2020, when he was advocating for opening schools… He told me that what he was doing on Twitter was: whenever someone was mentioning that schools should close, he would post a link to the Swedish study that showed that when schools had opened in spring of 2020, no children had died and very few teachers had gotten sick relative to other workers in the population. He posted over and over and over, he said, and was more active on Twitter than at any other time. That’s exactly when the trends blacklist was applied on him, in July 2020. And then again, three more times in 2022. Although there was no active trends blacklist for Martin at the moment.
> Is it still active for you?
> It was still active when I was at Twitter. I hope it’s been removed. My tweets seem to go more viral nowadays.
Jay Bhattacharya is Professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
Martin Kulldorff, PhD, is a biostatistician, epidemiologist and (edit: was until 2021) professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya
[2] https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins#NIH_director
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barr...
[5] https://unherd.com/2022/12/what-i-discovered-at-twitter-hq/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff
[7] https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m...