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“The Defender In-Depth” this week featured Rob Verkerk, Ph.D., founder, executive and scientific director of the Alliance for Natural Health, who joined host Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., to talk about censorship and how it affects people’s access to reliable information about health.
“We’re in this war of information,” Verkerk said. “We’re also in a war of values. And right at the heart of this is our ability to express views. If we can’t express our views, we don’t have a democracy. If we can’t receive information about health, we can’t actually engage properly in self-care.”
Alliance for Natural Health last month launched the “Free Speech 4 Health” campaign and a petition asking YouTube to change its medical misinformation policy, enacted in August 2023. Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is one of the campaign’s partners.
Verkerk discussed the campaign and petition and highlighted examples of Big Tech censorship of health-related information and attempts by governments to criminalize such speech.
He also discussed the risk of artificial intelligence (AI) being weaponized to stifle online speech further.
‘We are on a very slippery slope’
Verkerk said he founded the Alliance for Natural Health in 2002 to protect “the right to natural health,” noting that this right has been threatened “for decades.”
He said his organization has “used a very specific technique of good science and good law,” including in six successful legal cases against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
However, he said threats to natural health have grown as efforts to combat “misinformation” and “disinformation” have increased in recent years.
“It’s very easy for people to buy into this idea that control over misinformation is needed to protect you,” Verkerk said. “This is probably one of the biggest challenges we’ve got the world over as we move to more and more global control.”
As the “locus of control” moves from governments to Big Tech corporations, the two are “now almost inseparable,” Verkerk said.
YouTube and other platforms have embedded censorship into their official policies, Verkerk said, citing YouTube’s “incredibly draconian” new “medical misinformation” policy.
The policy bans any health-related content that isn’t “approved” by authorities such as the National Institutes of Health or the World Health Organization (WHO). “It’s basically like giving them a loaded gun,” Verkerk said.
YouTube’s policy isn’t limited to COVID-19-related content — it’s also used to censor natural health content, Verkerk said. He gave examples of intermittent fasting and Keto diets, which have been “very heavily shadowbanned” in recent months.
Verkerk said the central message of his organization’s free speech campaign is that YouTube’s medical misinformation policy “is not fit for purpose, and we want to see change.”
“People are getting ever more distorted information,” Verkerk said. “AI is right at the heart of it … We have to start reassessing the First Amendment in the digital age [but] it’s pretty hard to have a public debate on that when there is … censorship.”
Multiple governments have joined the act, Verkerk said, citing the European Union’s Digital Services Act, the U.K.’s “online safety” law, Ireland’s “hate speech” law and a proposed French law that could criminalize criticism of government-approved medical treatments.
“They now argue that the whole of the alternative medicine space is a cult,” Verkerk said, referring to France’s proposed law. “And so, they are proposing that anyone who suggests that a mainstream medical treatment is not appropriate, and they give an alternative treatment in its place, will be extremely heavily fined if not imprisoned.”
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Verkerk also cited the danger the WHO’s proposed “pandemic treaty” and amendments to the International Health Regulations pose to free speech, due to provisions that would lead to censorship of narratives not approved by the WHO.
“The misinformation war that will be … arbitrated by the WHO is a very significant part of the problem,” Verkerk said. “We are on a very slippery slope.”
Verkerk said it’s “time for reflection — big, deep reflection on where we are in society. We’re helping to develop … parallel systems of communication … parallel health systems … parallel news systems, parallel education systems.”
These are critical to “maintaining our fundamental freedoms” and the U.S. Constitution.
“If we do nothing, if we are silent, we will see this continuous march toward an ever more authoritarian situation, and I think many of us don’t want to see that happen.”
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