During a recent interview on the termination of the Instagram account for open access natural health resource GreenMedInfo, its founder Sayer Ji blasted Big Tech’s far-reaching censorship which is now extending to questions and opinions about the coronavirus and warned that this is fostering an environment of self-censorship.
Instagram deleted GreenMedInfo’s account with over 90,000 followers earlier this month after previously threatening to delete it for posting “harmful false information.”
These threats were directed at GreenMedInfo’s posts about the coronavirus including one post where it shared former Congressman Ron Paul’s statement that the coronavirus death rate continues to decline and that “petty dictators all around are calling for a return to lockdown.”
In an interview with social media lawyer Ian Corzine, Ji said he believes the main reason for the deletion of GreenMedInfo’s Instagram account was a live stream where he talked about the pandemic’s numbers being “orders of magnitude lower than what was originally stated to the public and which justified the March 15 lockdown of the United States.”
Ji also discussed other “alarming” censorship trends that he’s seen on his personal Sayer Ji Instagram account including his questions about the effectiveness of masks being labeled “harmful false information”:
“We’re getting to the point where you can’t even ask a question or hold an opinion on medical matters. That’s a real scary place to live I think.”
Additionally, he warned that Big Tech’s automated censorship systems are ushering in self-censorship:
“That’s when we actually become entrained to an AI [artificial intelligence] algorithm before, you know, it’s even taken over humanity. We’re already consenting to it taking over our freedom of speech. So the fear of being deplatformed is now conditioning people and I would rather be deplatformed than to censor myself.”
GreenMedInfo’s loss of its Instagram account was the latest of several Big Tech deplatformings it has faced since 2018 with Pinterest banning it in 2018 and email marketing service Mailchimp banning it in 2019.
Between April 15, 2018 and August 15, 2018, the Google Search visibility for GreenMedInfo also dropped by 81% as part of a change to Google’s algorithms that impacted many leading alternative health and wellness sites.
Ji’s interview comes as Big Tech’s censorship of the coronavirus has become so extreme that even statements from White House coronavirus advisors and President Trump are being censored under the guise of “misinformation.”
And as the censorship continues to become more expansive, the tech giants are continuously introducing new algorithmic changes that reduce recommendations to content from independent creators that challenges mainstream coronavirus talking points.
