Dr. Marty Makary said that censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected science, as the medical field saw a drop in public trust after Twitter suppressed tweets that included "misinformation" about the COVID-19 pandemic, even when Twitter users shared information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"That's unfortunately the state of repair that we need to engage in. I think public health officials look really bad for this. The public needs an apology," Makary told Fox News.
Makary said that in order to fix those problems, the government should lift the "gag rule" on health officials talking to the press. However, he said misinformation has been a problem for multiple presidential administrations, not just the current one.
"This has been going on for a long time, where state-controlled media censors all information that is not aligned with the leading political party in power. And that's sadly what we're seeing right here," Makary said. "There's a long list of misinformation from the government. They just wanted to change the narrative."
A different doctor, Marc Siegel, said censorship that comes from the government was "on the road to totalitarianism," according to the outlet.
The statements follow the latest string of bombshells from the Twitter Files, which claimed that the White House "rigged the COVID debate" by censoring information that was "inconvenient to government policy." It also discredited doctors and experts who disagreed with the administration's narrative and suppressed ordinary users, including those who shared data from the CDC, according to journalist David Zweig.
Zweig also determined that Twitter's moderation was largely done by bots or contractors in places such as the Philippines, where their lack of medical expertise contributed to a large number of errors in its censorship. However, high levels of bias among former Twitter leadership also contributed to the censorship, according to Zweig.
Previous revelations from the Twitter Files showed that the CIA, the FBI, and other government agencies had pressured Twitter to cave to political pressure. The reports are part of CEO Elon Musk's investigation into the previous happenings of the social media platform, including Twitter's handling of Hunter Biden's laptop, the blacklisting of certain conservative accounts, and the decision-making process relating to former President Donald Trump's suspension.
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