Thread by @MWStory

We're emerging from a pandemic where we learned that national science teams can make bad calls due to groupthink and cultural baggage, and we've put in place mechanisms (banning "anti-science" people from social media) to make it *harder* to disagree with them in the future

In April 2020 twitter and FB started banning accounts which encouraged people to break virus rules or (more loosely enforced) challenge established virus science. It's been escalating a bit since then with youtube joining in too

Some of the ideas they are penalising now were the established Western consensus early in 2020, like encouraging people to get infected for herd immunity or saying masks don't work- both presented to UK ministers as "the science", now memory-holed thanks to medical sacredness

If you were social distancing or wearing a mask in early March 2020 in the UK or saying that closing borders would prevent infections, you were doing so *against* medical and scientific advice- look at what happened to Caprice:

https://twitter.com/YearCovid/status/1371746810914607105?s=19

One of the reasons that the UKs national science team abandoned these ideas was pushback on social media and elsewhere from people who could take a fresh, first principles approach without the cultural baggage of "public health" culture throwing them off course

If the price we pay for preventing a few people thinking that bill gates can track them via a chip is our national public health teams going unchallenged next time there's a crisis, it's a terrible tradeoff given the errors we've seen