The social media platform Nextdoor.com censored Missouri parent John McCollum for sharing his opinions about mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory. “I only got onto Nextdoor to share a few things regarding our local school system which I was concerned about,” he says.
The website is known for censoring users with some having brought lawsuits against it.
McCollum created an online petition urging his child’s school district to allow masks to remain optional, but his online friends said they never saw it. He believes his posts that share the petition intentionally were suppressed. When McCollum tried to share the petition on Nextdoor, the post was flagged with a notice that said that anything posted about COVID-19 should have a source link to the Centers to Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization or local agencies.
Dash Crowlee also opposes mandatory mask mandates and lives within the same school district. He fears that masking children for long periods of time will have negative social consequences and is vocal about it on Twitter, but he experienced a different form of censorship.
During the election, he had numerous tweets deleted and his account suspended, but it was when he posted about masks that his account was nearly banned altogether.
This spring he grew so upset at the changing mask requirements that he decided to reach out to Dr. Anthony Fauci. Unable to find direct contact information, Crowlee took to Twitter and responded to Fauci’s tweets. Within hours he received a warning that his account would be banned if he did not delete the tweets opposing Fauci’s methods.
“It’s like they want you to admit defeat,” he said. “They could just delete the tweet automatically, but they cuckold you and make you do it.”
Many elected officials have expressed concerns about Big Tech censorship and what it means to the American people. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley even wrote a book about it. What the courts will decide remains uncertain, but when censorship is used to silence parents who express concerns over decisions that affect their children’s health, the efforts from social media companies to restrict discussion on important topics take America into unprecedented territory.
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice