Censoring Scott Atlas Should Be The Last Straw For Big Tech’s Censorship

If the coronavirus pandemic has proved anything it is that most Americans and their leaders are more concerned with their safety than with preserving their freedom.

Six months into the coronavirus era, most, though not all Americans may be willingto continue granting extraordinary powers to the government to deal with a threat to public safety. But the questions that they should also be considering is whether that same deference should be extended to big tech companies to censor discourse about the pandemic and what, if anything, can they do to prevent international monopolies from shutting down free speech.

The latest instance of censorship is so extreme and arbitrary that concern over the willingness of companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to shut down speech they don’t like ought to transcend the political differences that divide Americans. Or at least it would if the question of what can or cannot be said about the pandemic wasn’t bound up with partisan politics and the presidential election.

Regardless of whether you agree with Dr. Scott Atlas about whether the cost in terms of lives lost and damage down to the country of lockdowns justifies them, Google’s ability to remove him from the virtual public square ought to make reining the power of big tech monopolies a national priority.