This Week in Censorship: January 15-21
Today, the Censorship page at RealClearPublicAffairs is pleased to publish the first installment of This Week in Censorship, a roundup of the week’s most important stories about free speech and institutional censorship. We hope to offer a breakdown of the crucial writing and reporting curated on our page as well as a forecast of what’s to come on the censorship beat.
On the investigative front, this week began with Lee Fang’s thorough reporting on Moderna’s COVID vaccine booster rollout and the pharma company’s subsequent attempts to squelch skeptical independent media voices. Fang, in collaboration with RealClearInvestigations, reported on the “sprawling media operation” in place at the company, a joint effort with an NGO called The Public Good Projects presented to investors in September 2023 as a tool to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” and chill debate about mRNA vaccine safety. In practice, this media monitoring operation leveraged artificial intelligence to “shape the contours of vaccine-related discussion.” PGP has received over a million dollars in funding from the Biotechnology and Innovation Organization, a pharma industry lobby group.
Michael Shellenberger, Alex Berenson and Russell Brand were three notable commentators named in the company documents and emails, all of whom have been throttled or even banned by social media platforms in the past. Fang emphasizes that, in Moderna’s internal communications, none of these reporters’ claims about vaccine safety were refuted or even challenged—simply flagged as “misinformation” or “high-risk.” There can be little doubt anymore about the power corporate and government interests can wield over social media content moderation, and Moderna’s methods mirror those of the FBI and other government agencies uncovered in the Twitter Files just over a year ago.
In “Bookstores Refuse to Host and Event for my Book,” Rob Henderson, author of the forthcoming memoir “Troubled,” details his aggravating encounter with the gatekeepers of contemporary book publicity: bookstores. Henderson writes about psychology and is known for having coined the useful phrase “luxury beliefs”—that is, views on culture and social justice so removed from the exigencies of truly marginalized populations that they are useful only as virtue currency among the elite and comfortable. Fitting, then, that Henderson, who was raised in severe poverty in the California foster care system, only to go on to serve in the US Air Force and graduate from Yale and Cambridge, has been deemed too problematic to platform by all the bookstores in New York and San Francisco to whom he reached out. And for what reason? He can only speculate that his poor standing in the literary world is due to his connection to Dr. Jordan Peterson. Henderson writes a hugely popular Substack newsletter and his memoir is set for release with Simon & Schuster next month.
Dr. Peterson himself made free speech headlines this week with the latest development in the College of Psychologists of Ontario’s effort to force the Canadian psychologist to undergo “social media training” as a result of his activity on Twitter/X. Tyler Dawson reported for the National Post on the decision of a three-judge panel at the Ontario Court of Appeal to dismiss Peterson’s own motion for leave to appeal. “There are no other legal avenues open to me now,” Peterson wrote on X on Tuesday. Having exhausted the appeals process, Peterson must now participate in the mandated “re-education” process or lose his professional license. The College’s initial investigation of Peterson concluded that his “public statements may reasonably be regarded by members of the profession as disgraceful, dishonourable, and/or unprofessional.” “Social media training” may sound benign, even euphemistic, but the example set by the College is clear and political. Howard Levitt, Peterson’s lawyer, said he thinks the decision will “be a license to regulatory bodies to be more aggressive.”
Another excellent piece this week was Sahar Tartak’s “DEI Squelches Student Reporting at Yale, Penn,” published in the Free Press. In Tartak’s words, “a new generation of reporters is taught that censorship imposed by diversity committees is more important than the objective reporting of facts.” Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives at elite academic institutions have been the subject of heated debate since the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay early this month. Gay was the subject of a plagiarism scandal first uncovered by Aaron Sibarium at the Washington Free Beacon.
Looking ahead to next week, expect (or hope) to see increased scrutiny of the government’s role in censoring conversations about the origin of the COVID pandemic. Emily Kopp at US Right to Know published a bombshell report on Thursday, presenting the now-robust genetic evidence to suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was synthesized in a laboratory as the result of grant proposal known as DEFUSE. As the evidence mounts, it is crucial to recall the manner in which the lab-leak hypothesis—routinely decried as a “conspiracy theory” for years—and its proponents were mocked and censored by social media companies, congresspeople, and mainstream media outlets. The picture of institutional wagon-circling is clearer than it’s been in the four years since the pandemic began, but there is yet more to be uncovered about the nature of the federal government’s involvement in both the virology research and the ensuing media narratives.
