Twitter
BannedTwitter banned ZeroHedge (an independent news outlet) for reposting public information. The account @ZeroHedge had approximately 670k followers at the time.
On Jan 29, ZeroHedge published this article challenging the official narrative that the Coronavirus epidemic started because someone ate bat soup at a Wuhan wet market. The article shines a light on the Wuhan Institute of Virology (a lab located near the wet market), specifically on a researcher who was the “Leader of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunization Group.” ZeroHedge found his email and phone number publicly available on the institute’s website and posted that information at the end of the article saying:
Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.
Twitter said this was “abuse and harassment” after other news outlets claimed this was “doxing”, even though the information was publicly available elsewhere.
Opinion: it’s more likely that ZeroHedge was banned for simply pointing out that the virus was possibly lab driven since, at the time, that was a very conspiratorial notion, and ZeroHedge was one of the first, if not the first, to propose that idea.
About four months later, Twitter reinstated ZeroHedge claiming “we made an error in our enforcement action.”