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Who is Jay Bhattacharya? Stanford University prof blacklisted by Twitter for opposing Covid-19 lockdowns

'It's a system designed to... tell people look I'm bad [and] I have dangerous ideas, don't listen to me,' said Jay Bhattacharya, who wrote a controversial letter in 2020 declaring Covid-19 lockdowns were damaging

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA: A tenured Stanford professor says that he was blacklisted by Twitter for opposing Covid-19 lockdowns as some of his ideas were too dangerous. While appearing on the Ricochet podcast along with conservative host James Lileks on Friday, December 9, Dr Jay Bhattacharya discussed his inability to be verified on Twitter for it was disclosed last week that the social media banned him to prevent his ideas from spreading. 

"It turns out James that I'm on a blacklist which I thought the United States kind of put behind us in like the 1950s but I guess that's the modern way now," Bhattacharya said, according to Daily Mail. "What happens with this kind of mechanism of social control is to tell the world that this idea is too dangerous to discuss. This person is too dangerous to think about." 

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"It's basically a social credit system, right? It's a system designed to... tell people look I'm bad [and] I have dangerous ideas, don't listen to me," Bhattacharya continued. "I think that's really the purpose of something like that like it's not possible for the internet to squelch ideas if they happen." 

Bhattacharya, who previously co-authored a letter - the Great Barrington Declaration - in 2020, which declared the lockdowns were damaging. A year after Bhattacharya wrote the controversial letter, he joined Twitter in 2021. The social media did not give the Stanford professor the blue checkmark despite appearing on various news channels to share his views on the pandemic and having a following of about 290,000. "I had some success, but I applied three times to become verified and they turned me down," Bhattacharya said.

Journalist Bari Weiss also confirmed that the professor was on Twitter's blacklist, along with other public figures that questioned the severity of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Specialist teams were put to work at the time dealing with 200 cases a day. Conservative commentators, including Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, were also intentionally put on a "search blacklist" in Bongino's case or tabbed "do not amplify," in the case of Kirk. 

Weiss revealed on Twitter last week the second tranche of what has been termed The Twitter Files. She said that Twitter used what was termed 'visibility filtering' to downplay accounts they objected to and had people working to reduce the traction gained by individuals or their tweets. One senior Twitter insider called it "a very powerful tool." A top-level 'Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support' team backed up the claims that the teams worked to minimize certain accounts or topics. The CEO and the legal advisors decided on the sensitive cases of censorship. Jack Dorsey and his successor as CEO, Parag Agrawal, were on the team.