Hemingway RIPS Twitter for Reported Censorship of Tom Elliot: ‘War on Freedom’ Continues
October 19th, 2021
Twitter appears to be up to its usual tricks. The platform reportedly censored Grabien Founder and Editor Tom Elliot for questioning the COVID-19 narrative.
Mollie Hemingway, Senior Editor at The Federalist, is having none of it. “Twitter has suspended the important media figure @tomselliott, for critiquing one of many illogical COVID arguments floating around,” Hemingway announced in an Oct. 19 tweet. “Their war on freedom of information, speech, press continues apace.” The account of Tom Elliot appears to be locked. His account has been silent for the past 24 hours at the time this blog was written.
Grabien describes itself as a website that provides a “suite of tools for hosts and producers (TV, radio, podcasts), corporations, PR firms and media personalities, and just hard-core news junkies.” Elliot, in recent days, has used the newsroom wing of his website to skewer the media for reportedly misinforming the public amid the pandemic with reports such as: Supercut: Media Mock Joe Rogan for Claim They Made Up About Horse Pills and Joe Rogan Asks Sanjay Gupta Why CNN Lied About Joe Taking Horse Dewormer.
Big Tech has used COVID-19 as a carte-blanche excuse to restrict speech that they have deemed to be dangerous misinformation. Yet, at the same time, some of the tech giants have allowed actual dangerous propaganda from foreign powers.
If Twitter was serious about tackling so-called misinformation, it would have a reckoning with the World Health Organization that regurgitated the propagandistic lies of the Communist Chinese government as truth. The WHO used Twitter to tell the world as late as mid-January 2020:
“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.”
To this date, Twitter has still refused to take action against the now-infamous tweet that may have worsened the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Twitter allowed spokesperson for the Information Department of China’s Foreign Ministry Lijian Zhao to scapegoat the U.S. military as the source of COVID-19. The platform also allowed a video from the Chinese embassy in France titled, “Once Upon a Virus.” That particular video contained several myths and pretended that the Chinese government and the World Health Organization were forthcoming about the virus.
Twitter has not yet responded to inquiry from MRC Free Speech America to confirm or deny that the platform took action against Elliot’s account.
** Update ** According to Elliott, his account has been restricted for one week for violating rules against abuse and harassment. The tweet that he says got him in trouble was a response to Andy Slavitt saying that the lesson to be learned from Colin Powell's death is that we should all get vaccinated. Elliott tweeted, according to his statement to Dana Loesch, "Get vaccinated and you too can die of COVID." Eliott also noted that Slavitt had reached out to him via DM to say that "Sarcasm is the spice of Twitter," and that he does not agree with the censorship.