October 19, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – After several days of controversy over Twitter’s censorship practices, the social media giant temporarily suspended White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Scott Atlas over the weekend for pushing back against the prevailing orthodoxy on mask wearing.
Atlas is a medical doctor, internationally recognized medical scholar, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Conservatives have viewed Atlas as an antidote of sorts to the Trump administration’s previous point man for COVID-19 expertise, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is much more supportive of lockdowns and masking.
Twitter locked Atlas out of his account Saturday over two tweets (the first of which has since been deleted) citing places where masks have failed to contain COVID-19 and arguing that instead masks should be used “for their intended purpose – when close to others, especially hi (sic) risk. Otherwise, social distance. No widespread mandates.”
Like Facebook and Google, Twitter has assumed the role as a watchdog against COVID-19 “misinformation,” generally taken to mean anything that contradicts the opinion of the controversial World Health Organization (WHO). But in an email to The Federalist, Atlas cited several pieces of information that supported his tweets.
“Cases exploded even with mandates: Los Angeles County, Miami-Dade County, Hawaii, Alabama, the Philippines, Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Israel,” Atlas wrote. He also cited material from Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and even the WHO itself, which conceded that “widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider.”
Atlas returned to Twitter on Monday with a literary warning about the suppression of evidence in support of a favored narrative:
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.”
George Orwell, 1984
— Scott W. Atlas (@SWAtlasHoover) October 19, 2020
This is not the first time internet giants have censored Atlas over COVID-19. Last month, Google-owned YouTube deleted a June interview in which he offered a detailed critique of government lockdown policies.
This latest incident follows an ongoing uproar over Twitter censoring the New York Post after a bombshell report on emails that appear to show Hunter Biden selling access to his father, former Vice President and current Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, during the previous administration.