When a friend asked us to look into analyzing Plandemic, a ~20 minute documentary on the orchestrated nature of the COVID19 lockdowns, we were surprised to find that it wasn’t in any of the usual places. There were only links to criticism of the movie available on Google, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter. An afterimage of the documentary itself, a residual effect of algorithmic censorship. These private platforms had decided the contents of the documentary were so dangerous, so outrageous, that the only way of addressing it was to get rid of it completely.

Clearly, the effort was largely successful. The video isn’t easily available on the conventional platforms. But it’s only censorship if you assume from the outset that tech giants are the only possible source for information, that if something isn’t indexed on the front page of google, then it doesn’t exist. There are other places on the internet, places like dailymotion, duckduckgo… even bing (!) that let you find it quickly and easily.

So we at the Demystifying lab started thinking about the questions of censorship, digital platforms, and information warfare. Is this even censorship? Is it really a problem that you can’t find Plandemic on Google?

For us, it comes down to the fact that decision-making needs to be something that’s cultivated in each individual, rather than at a central distribution site for everything that’s deemed “quality.” To make good choices when we’re making a private decision, we must each have a wide-ranging, robust, and varied understanding of the world. Otherwise, we run the risk of making a private decision that isn’t informed by a personal interpretation of circumstances. Instead, the decider - short on time and substance - replaces their own perspective with one that they picked off the shelf.

Removing Plandemic from central circulation, created just these conditions! Instead of being able to look at the thing directly for all its flaws and absurdities, we’re left with these second order impressions, listening to reactions of someone watching something we have never seen! It’s a tragedy, to boot. Rather than taking the opportunity to teach people decentralized sense making, we have instead taught them to take someone else’s word on a flimsy, emotional presentation.

Instead of taking advantage of the informational abundance of the modern age, it seems that we have decided the best way forward is to actively cultivated which facts float to the top. Sometimes by algorithm, sometimes by the much more prosaic flesh-and-blood vias of news reports geared toward a particular audience; the path taken in constructing this narrative is littered by omissions and distortions.

On one hand, this is completely understandable, since media companies are fundamentally businesses and so in this sense they are merely “keeping the customer satisfied.” But what happens when the very machinery for locating information bend under ulterior interests? A critical example is censorship by Google, Facebook, and YouTube. Google alone serves more than 90% of the web searches worldwide. On top of that, people everywhere are increasingly turning to social media sites for news.

Inevitably, our attention has settled on the most clear cut intersection of all of the above - the recent documentary series, Plandemic 1 and 2. For those who have been hanging around under a bridge for the last few months, or who have been on a long and arduous through hike, let us catch you up. 

Plandemic, a film by Mikki Willis, was released this summer and saw far-reaching distribution on social media before it was effectively blotted out of existence. The film is centered on the testimony of scientist Judy Mikovits. Mikovits, full of righteous anger and a fiery passion, tells the story of how her promising research career was cut short by the interference of powerful figures at the US Department of Health and Human services. She goes so far as to suggest that, as a result of the actions of these same people - Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield - “we’ll all be killed by this agenda.”   

It’s a simple and compelling piece of media. At its center is a victimized scientist, cut down at the peak of her career, by the very people who are currently in charge of the key institutions that are deciding COVID policy on a federal level. The camera goes between Judy and Mikki as the story unfolds, and ominous music swells at just the right moment to pull most effectively on the heartstrings. Taking a moment to step back from any of the actual claims in the film, it’s worth acknowledging just how effective this simple format is.

So effective, actually, that the major social networks - Youtube, Facebook, Twitter - chose to block the video. Not before it racked up something like 8 million views, but still. You can find it through Bing, Dailymotion, Bitchute, Duck Duck Go - the lame-duck alternatives to the major platforms. 

A search for “Plandemic” on any of the major social networks results in a long list videos dismantling the movie, person after person offering their expert opinions about why the narrative contained within was problematic, misleading, and incomprehensive. Science Mag provides a fact-check of the first film here. Propublica did a nice job teaching one how to evaluate information, using Plandemic as an example and the piece is absolutely worth your time.

The conversation that follows here is more focused on the question of censorship - and searches for solutions. We encourage you to go out and watch the Plandemic videos yourself, but keep an eye out for the one-sided, misleading nature of the narrative.

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MSD: I wanted to link the Plandemic videos here so readers could follow along with what all the hype is over, but then decided it wasn’t worth risking the ire of Google. I don’t want our site to be censored in any capacity. The film can be found on its own website.

AB: You might be right that linking directly to it would cause issues, and that’s a pretty frightening state of affairs - that the central, most effective platforms for indexing information are actively preventing certain content from percolating to the top. 

At the same time, there’s an argument to be made for not posting it solely based on the fact that it contains a ton of misleading claims, you know?

MSD: Well Google certainly believes that. Facebook and YouTube too. Is there anything redeemable about the film? What is its central message?

AB: The central message is a little tricky to parse, but I think it comes in the first ten minutes of the film, when Mikovits starts talking about a coverup that Anthony Fauci is involved in. She intimates that the leadership of the CDC and the US Department of Health and Human services have carried out the pandemic as a path to enormous riches. 

MSD: If that accusation proved true, it would be quite groundbreaking. Certainly, people everywhere should be appraised of these matters. But the opportunity to face your accuser is also a deeply ingrained part of our justice system. It’s a shame that Mr. Willis didn’t include a response from the accused. As it stands, the film comes across as shouting fire in a theater, when it’s not clear to anyone, even the film-maker that said theater is even on fire. I can see the danger of spreading this kind of info.

AB: Agreed - a federal government-led conspiracy to kill people with untested vaccines that are lining the pockets of department appointees would be a bombshell report. But that’s exactly the problem with Plandemic, isn’t it? There’s no real evidence in the movie, beyond “Judy Mikovits said so.”

For me, the most frustrating aspect of the entire thing is that Willis actually had a platform that he could have used for really fantastic journalism - but instead he used it to create an emotional piece of propaganda that he seems to justify because “the other side did it first.”

Let me ask you this. Does its misleading nature justify widespread removal?

MSD: That’s the real question here, and our justice system has considered the freedom to promote hazardous information in the past. Initially, through the case of Shenk v. United States the Supreme Court ruled that if information was dangerous - it should be removed from public info spheres. Though the language restricting free speech has been legally updated with the decision of Brandenburg v. Ohio, the basic sentiment remains in tact. Today, one cannot incite lawless action with their speech.

Willis does not appear to be promoting criminal action so there doesn’t appear to be cause for the law to get involved. Moreover, the search engines that have blocked this film aren’t public property — they’re private spaces. They absolutely have the right to remove what they perceive as dangerous from their house.

The removal of information, however, might come with its own dangers.

AB: Yeah, there’s really two opposing forces coming into conflict here. 

On one side, you have the fact that the internet is this platform where all kinds of ideas are frothed up and distributed widely, and people like that. The freedom of the internet is one of the selling points, as far as I can tell. 

But on the other hand, you have this freedom starting to endanger the stability of society, and it’s freaking people out. They want the tech companies to do something about it. But when that process happens in the court of public opinion, it can get creepy. 

Google, youtube, facebook, they can just disappear content, block people for posting about it. The rationale is that it’s because misinformation is dangerous, but who is deciding what people are allowed to see? 

MSD: Yes, I can imagine that little gems could get lost when some presentation is blotted out of existence like this. I’m not sure, however, that is the case with Plandemic.  Is there anything redeemable there that I missed?

AB: That’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? On the whole, there seems to be only a single piece of the entire movie that stands up to more than a cursory internet search. At some point Mikovits points to the Bayh-Dole act, a decision to allow researchers to earn funds from patents filed based on publicly funded work, as the time where science in the US went off track.

Otherwise… I’m not sure that anything - and I mean anything - in the entire movie holds up. But the presentation is so compelling - emotional music, high production values - that it’s easy to see why people were so afraid of it. The movie basically asserts a series of falsehoods that sum to the accusation that Fauci is going to make millions of dollars off of it.

MSD: We’ve talked about the conflicts of interest between engineering and science in the past, and it seems like the Bayh-Dole legislation might have reinforced that paradigm but we should investigate the matter in more detail. 

Even if the Bayh-Dole Act turns out to be a legitimate concern, and Mr. Willis really was trying to spotlight the corruption of science by technological interests, Plandemic didn’t do the matter any service by chopping it up with a bunch of false narratives.

AB: No, that doesn’t tend to help anything.

MD: If Bayh-Dole turns out to actually be as bad as he makes it sound, it would make me much more suspicious of the film and film-maker. If I wanted to discredit opposition to Bay-Dole, this is the film I would make… But again, I need to study Bayh-Dole. I doubt this is the case - I would bet he is actually just a sloppy filmmaker.

AB: That sloppiness is at the heart of the story. If Willis hadn’t been so sloppy, the movie probably wouldn’t have been removed or censored in any way. A measured documentary that gave a balanced perspective on the situation probably wouldn’t have even budged the needle in terms of public attention. But this crazy piece of “truth-telling” gets the whole thing scrubbed from the internet… and when the second movie comes out no one sees it because you can’t even post about it on social media.

MSD: It is hard to have sympathy for Willis losing his Google ranking.

I also think that if censorship becomes a problem, where useful information is repeatedly being thrown out because it conflicts with advertising or other financial or political interests, then the only solution is construction and patronization of alternative channels, search engines, etc..

AB: Well, the case here is that potentially useful information is being thrown out because it’s nested in a bed of lies at worst and tendentious statements at best.

MSD: Yes, so the solution would be to take that useful information and create media that puts it at the center, examining it from multiple perspectives.

AB: In that case, it seems like censorship isn’t a problem. If all that it takes to escape getting your content scrubbed is even a half-hearted attempt at objectivity, then should we actually be concerned about tech giants censoring things? Why would we want to accept having well-packaged misinformation wandering around in the world?

MSD: It’s still a matter worth keeping an eye on, because we’ve inadvertently given privately interested companies a great deal of power over our sense-making circuits. I’m also somewhat reluctant to support patriarchal removal of misinformation. I’d rather everyone have the tools to identify misinformation instead, and then have free access to the raw goods. That paradigm feels less vulnerable to subversion and conflicts of interest. 

AB: Sure, a world where everyone is a canny assessor of information is definitely the best option! But that’s some way off, and in the meantime we have a system that is getting flooded with information that is just outright false, and it’s actually deciding these big social currents in our societies.

I think that there needs to be some kind of service where people volunteer to watch propaganda with you that are interested in having a conversation about it, who understand why you’d be interested in it. Someone that straddles the line between fact-checker and therapist. 

MSD: I think people that enjoy this kind of film would prefer to keep their conversations limited to the naive or similarly those similarly entertained by conspiracy theories. But I’d happily volunteer for a shift.x

AB: Well, let’s finish InDOCTORnation (Plandemic 2) and see where that leaves us before stepping up to take one for the team.

--- DS ---

We’ll post a link here when we’ve written a followup to the second part of the series, and read more about the Bayh-Dole act.

Let us know in the comments what you think of the format, the contents of this piece, or just the world in general - we love hearing from readers.