For a while, YouTube and friends were banning people who pointed out the WHO was wrong. So, probably quite a few people.

that was specifically about calling Covid a hoax. Those who were fighting against this censorship weren’t fighting for Covid being airborne or not

My recollection was that they banned disagreeing with the WHO[0]. The examples given in that article are fair enough for banning, but they banned scientists who were not quite so crazy[1]. Anyway, that’s based on my memory (which is often faulty), but those links seem to corroborate it.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52388586

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/46573762/why-is-yo...

They are not the only ones at all. Same thing happened to a lot of other people. There was for example a lot of good information from the Italian National Institute of Health that simply listed the number and type of comorbidities in deceased Covid patients. Mentioning these numbers, even with proper citation was cause for being banned/not being approved by moderators. It didn't fit the official narrative.

Like my sibling poster said, it probably triggered the "covid hoax" spidey senses. People are not rational in these times. They're emotional and won't even listen enough or think enough to understand the difference between looking at facts and discussing them vs. calling it a hoax. Covid is very real. I know from multiple close friends affected. I was also told via official channels that anyone obese would dare badly and die. Anecdotal data: Yet some very obese friends made it through without more than a few mild symptoms. Months later new research came out that said being sedentary is much worse than being obese. This friend while being obese is very active. No car, walks everywhere, physical labour job etc. Just telling this story would probably get me banned on certain sites.

There is this problem where:

1. A situation becomes political, and all kinds of claims are made by demagogues without evidence in order to score points, based on whatever they would like to be true.

2. There is lots of arguing, and subtle points like “we don’t know enough to know the truth yet but X seems practical/probable” get attacked by all sides or used by the people from 1 to show how much they are being silenced or to generate conspiracy theories.

3. Eventually the reality of the situation becomes mostly clear, and the people who happened to jump to the right conclusion without evidence use it to recruit more followers, and the people who were wrong don’t want to give an inch because it benefits the group who were right for the wrong reasons.

In the end most people get more polarized and there is no clear way to short circuit the process.

In my experience, those called "conspiracy theorists" (or any other name for that matter) turned out to be mostly right. The subreddit /r/wuhan_flu was quarantined last February for allegations that the virus may have escaped from a lab and that the virus may be airborne. They did not even claim it was definitely so, but it was just speculation based on multiple papers. That subreddit is still quarantined as of today. That's just one of the thousands of examples I've come across.

The people who spread G5 and chip theories are a very small group compared to the rest of the skeptics, yet they are portrayed by the mass media etc. as one and the same. This is reflected in how many people deal with people who criticize the official story.

We seem to have lost all logic and critical thinking. There is no room for healthy discussions anymore. Instead people are personally attacking each other.

There were always reasonable people questioning the WHO and whether this was a lab leak, the problem is that they were out-shouted by crazies, then got swept up into various blanket bans.

In general this seems to happen to all moderate discourse during highly political events, to the point where I almost feel like it's a strategy part of the time.

my goodness the only thing that I can think of is that people are going to get incredibly angry, if these histories get parsed accurately by the wider public.

I'm not saying the general public, only a wider range of people who are less susceptible to being spun probably is enough of the population to swing the ultimate public views.

There is a lot of straw-manning going on, so if you say you disagree with the WHO on a minor point, you could be accused of calling COVID-19 a hoax.

Well they were also censoring videos speculating about the lab leak theory. So they were definitely treating any discussion about covid that diverged from what who/cdc were saying as misinformation.

No. They had some contentID-esque automation bumbling around silencing doctors who were trying to communicate their understanding of the situation as well as silencing the crackpots.

That is not true, in the Netherlands a critic had one of his videos pulled by YouTube for claiming COVID-19 spreads through aerosols when this was not the consensus. Yet.

You are referring to Maurice de Hond I assume?

I looked and couldn't find anything to suggest this person was banned from YouTube.

I am not sure if the comment above me was referring to him, but I know back then they called what he was claiming (improving ventilation) misinformation.

He was not banned but he had a video pulled because it didn’t agree with the ‘scientific consensus’

No, pretty much anything was banned or throttled including professors sharing graphs of data, or people re-sharing articles critical of the WHO or the COVID response. And it's still happening, by the way. That's not in the past.

Their Tommy album was pretty good.