Originally published at: Twitter Removes Bolsonaro Tweets Questioning Virus Hysteria | Infostormer.com
Twitter is now going so far as to remove tweets from the leader of a major country because he dared question all of this insane virus hysteria.
AFP:
Two tweets by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro in which he questioned quarantine measures aimed at containing the novel coronavirus were removed Sunday, on the grounds that they violated the social network’s rules.
The far-right leader had posted several videos in which he flouted his government’s social distancing guidelines by mixing with supporters on the streets of Brasilia and urging them to keep the economy going.
Two of the posts were removed and replaced with a notice explaining why they had been taken down.
Twitter explained in a statement that it had recently expanded its global rules on managing content that contradicted public health information from official sources and could put people at greater risk of transmitting COVID-19.
“Official sources” they say. Well who do they define as an “official source” exactly? Bolsonaro is the leader of Brazil a major country with many millions of people. He is by definition an “official source.”
In one of the deleted videos, Bolsonaro tells a street vendor, “What I have been hearing from people is that they want to work.”
“What I have said from the beginning is that ‘we are going to be careful, the over-65s stay at home,'” he said.
“We just can’t stand still, there is fear because if you don’t die of the disease, you starve,” the vendor is seen telling Bolsonaro, who responds: “You’re not going to die!”
In another video, the president calls for a “return to normality,” questioning quarantine measures imposed by governors and some mayors across the giant South American country as an effective containment measure against the virus.
“If it continues like this, with the amount of unemployment what we will have later is a very serious problem that will take years to be resolved,” he said of the isolation measures.
“Brazil cannot stop or we’ll turn into Venezuela,” Bolsonaro later told reporters outside his official residence.
Bolsonaro is right about the hysteria. Shutting down everything is in the process of creating all sorts of economic and societal disasters around the world. This is going to prove to be a far bigger problem than the virus itself.
But what’s really insane is how all this hysteria is being enforced by social media companies like Twitter. If a major world leader can’t speak freely about a subject without having his posts deleted, than who can?
This is the end result of Donald Trump’s refusal to do anything about these social media monopolies. Free speech on the Internet does not exist because of this situation.