[deleted] Dude, wtf are you talking about? The mainstream media, social media was 100% in cooperation with the governments and public health, pushing only ONE message and one solution.
There were medical experts who were silenced, banned and cancelled because they dared to question the status quo. There was no discussion allowed.
The problem is that people entirely misrepresent what happens to suit their own narrative.
To say there was only one opinion allowed and one narrative is obviously incorrect. There was lots of debate. These things were discussed constantly.
There is a difference between having a debate and making a plan and implementing a plan. You have a debate and it results in a plan. Simply because other people recognized that the opinions of the contrarian doctors and influencers were stupid, and went with a different plan, doesn’t mean they were silenced. Governments were not ideologically homogenous. They did not push a single agenda. People were not ostracized because they had a different opinion. They were ostracized because they turned against reality.
Desite being “silenced”, somehow so many people heard their opinions. They were not silenced, they were amplified. These silenced influencers were featured in the New York Times, they wrote multiple op-eds in prominent outlets like the Wall Street Journal, they appeared regularly on FOX news, they were featured on the most popular podcasts in the world, they met directly with the president, some were promoted to decision-making positions in US states. They had more access than most people did.
But it is revealing that, some people think that the most traumatic thing that could have happened during a pandemic was to have a YouTube video taken down.
They even had the opportunity to take their grievances over being silenced to the Supreme Court. And they lost.
The issue is that when it comes to these matters, particularly, when people claim censorship, it is always ideologically aligned. People who posted videos debunking disinformation also had their videos taken down, and their social media content censored. We hear much less complaints about that content being censored.
And, when it comes to being silenced, the people that were truly silenced were the people that died. They no longer have a voice. They cannot speak on whether the policies implemented were too stringent or too relaxed. Influencers on YouTube and Rumble can.
The children that died of measles have been silenced. While their parents are able to give interviews and still claim that measles isn’t really that bad and that they still wouldn’t vaccinate their children, their children who died of measles are not able to present their opinion on whether or not measles is serious.
Things that mattered greatly during the previous administration, like the performative claims about particular viewpoints being suppressed, are suddenly no longer important while the current administration has slashed and burned research that challenges their political ideology. Anti-DEI ideological litmus tests, banned words in research, and the mass cancellation of grants based on that test and the banning of science the new administration doesn’t like (e.g., mRNA vaccines, investigating vaccine hesitancy, researching disinformation, etc.) show how seriously they cared about censorship.