Twitter Blocked Vaccine Injury/Death Hashtags to Boost Acceptance

This article originally appeared in Courageous Discourse and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

I have always wondered about how many people rely on hashtags to search for topics on social media and whether they have any impact.

The use of hashtags was first proposed by American blogger Chris Messina in a 2007 tweet.^[3][4] Messina felt that “they were born of the internet, and owned by no one”.^[5][6] Hashtags became entrenched in the culture of Twitter^[7] and soon emerged across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.^[8][9] In June 2014, hashtag was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as “a word or phrase with the symbol # in front of it, used on social media websites and apps so that you can search for all messages with the same subject”.^[10][11]

Meghana and Chavali studied vaccine sentiment over time and found that Twitter was actually suppressing tweets with certain hashtags in order to influence public perception of COVID-19 vaccination.

You could imagine that sentiment has a balance, some people feel benefited and others are harmed. If those harmed have their hashtags blocked then the overall profile of vaccination would look favorable.

Based on this report, I can tell you I am not excited about using hashtags in the future. They seem like they are easy targets for censorship and content moderation.

Let me know what you think.

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Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

www.mcculloughfnd.org

Meghana GVR, Chavali DP. Examining the Dynamics of COVID-19 Misinformation: Social Media Trends, Vaccine Discourse, and Public Sentiment. Cureus. 2023 Nov 3;15(11):e48239. doi: 10.7759/cureus.48239. PMID: 38054129; PMCID: PMC10693987.

Copyright 2024 Peter McCullough MD MPH