By tippinsights Editorial Board, TIPP Insights

A New York Times headline was buried under a busy news cycle featuring President Biden’s legislative victories on climate and Liz Cheney’s humiliating defeat in Wyoming: “Walensky, Citing Botched Pandemic Response, Calls for C.D.C. Reorganization.”

The long mea-culpa had finally begun. Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, had told the agency’s roughly 11,000 employees earlier this week: “To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications.”

For an agency with a massive $12 billion budget and access to the farthest corners of scientific research through its partnerships with the nation’s best public health experts at colleges and universities, we have said that the CDC’s handling of the Covid pandemic – and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s frequent public utterances – were disasters. Enormous credit should go to Director Walensky for coming clean and acknowledging that public communications, among other areas of responsibility, were faulty.

For over two years, Big Tech went along with the CDC’s and other public health agencies’ assessments as the only version of the truth. All debate about the pandemic was stifled; violators were warned to delete their Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram posts after acknowledging that they had made a mistake. In many cases, the Big Tech police suspended accounts, including banning some for life.

Twitter was the most aggressive with its censorship. Its misleading information policy included penalties for “sharing content that may mislead people about the nature of the COVID-19 virus; the efficacy and safety of preventative measures, treatments, or other precautions to mitigate or treat the disease; official regulations, restrictions, or exemptions about health advisories; or the prevalence of the virus or risk of infection or death associated with COVID-19.” In twelve months, from March 2020 to March 2021, Twitter removed more than 8,400 tweets and notified some 11.5 million accounts worldwide about violations of its COVID-19 information rules.

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When will Big Tech apologize to Americans for its Covid censorship? Given Big Tech’s hubris and lack of accountability, we doubt if a slew of apologies is forthcoming. Nor do we believe that a top-down review of their censorship policies will be announced. And even if they were announced, nothing much would likely result from such an exercise.

Public polling has been overwhelmingly against the CDC. Americans say that general guidance was too frequently changed and often confusing. Last summer, Walensky announced that vaccinated Americans need not wear masks. She was acknowledging what Americans implicitly knew. The risk of contracting the virus was relatively small if one were vaccinated. And she was a good marketer. By removing the mask mandate, she indirectly incentivized more Americans to become vaccinated.

The Left revolted, some even calling for her resignation. She bravely stood by her statement but backed down due to White House pressure. The revised guidance said everyone should wear masks where “transmission was high,” an intentionally vague standard. What constitutes ‘high?’ What should mask-wearers do? Remove masks when they travel from a high-transmission area to a medium-transmission region? Published transmission rates are lagging indicators – easy to measure but hard to change because of past events. Should people then constantly monitor transmission rates even when the data was from prior weeks?

Posting any of these questions on Twitter could have gotten you suspended. Even saying that the “transmission was high” standard was vague would have been sufficient to be penalized.

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There was enormous public support when Elon Musk announced that he would acquire Twitter. Musk, an avid supporter of free speech and the consummate science entrepreneur, has said that Twitter is the modern avatar of the public square where vibrant debate should occur.

Contrast Musk’s vision with that of Parag Agrawal, the current Twitter C.E.O. Speaking in November 2020 to the M.I.T. Technology Review, Agrawal said: “Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation, and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.”

As though this response wasn’t shocking enough, Agrawal continued: “One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce commodity today is attention. There’s a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we’re working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we’re building, how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.”

Twitter’s foundational flaw, indeed all of Big Tech’s, is contained in the last sentence above: “…how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.”

No, Big Tech, that is not your role. We don’t need you to direct anything. We want you to be a platform where free expression, especially in matters of unsettled science, is celebrated. So, change your outrageous policies immediately. A genuine apology along the way would be welcome.

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