The widely-read right-wing news blog ZeroHedge, boasting as many as over 673,000 subscribers, has been suspended from Twitter, with no grounds for the move explicitly provided on behalf of the social network.
The website, though, later said it received a notice stating it had engaged in “abuse or harassment".
ZeroHedge’s last tweet, prior to suspension, contained a reference to a paper by Indian researchers pointing to alleged striking similarities between the coronavirus raging in China’s Hubei and well beyond, and HIV.
The whole paper has been portrayed by internet researcher Christopher Torres Lugo as “conspiracy theories claiming that 2019-nCoV is a bioweapon".
A couple of hours before the suspension, BuzzFeed published a story accusing ZeroHedge, who it brands as “a popular pro-Trump website”, of revealing personal information about a scientist from Wuhan, China and “falsely accusing them of creating the coronavirus as a bioweapon".
Doxxing is indeed considered to be a violation of Twitter rules, though no specification is given as to what exact data has been unlawfully released.
BuzzFeed, which had earlier published the controversial Steele Dossier with never confirmed compromising allegations about then-President-elect Donald Trump, was outraged by the “rumours and lies” it said ZeroHedge posted about the origins and peculiarities of the deadly coronavirus.
One of its most recent publications featured researchers’ reactions to the Indian virologists’ paper and their “unlikely fortuitous” comparison of the novel virus with HIV - central to ZeroHedge's said report.
ZeroHedge promptly weighed in on the suspension expressing rage about referring to a proper in-depth journalistic approach as “abuse:”
“Are we then to understand that we have now reached a point the mere gathering of information, which our colleagues in the media may want to eventually do as thousands of people are afflicted daily by the Coronavirus, is now synonymous with 'abuse and harassment'?” the news blog queried, before replying bitterly:
“According to Twitter, and certainly our competitors in the media, the answer is yes".
Similar reactions, to the one above, have flooded Twitter:
The 2019-nCoV, which was first registered in the Chinese province of Hubei in late December, gained momentum right ahead of the Chinese New Year, which the authorities ruled would last longer this year to slow down the spread of the infection.
The disease causes a severe respiratory infection and pneumonia in particular, the immune response and vaccines against which are currently being looked into by the scientific community, and has so far affected almost 11,000 people across the world, leading to over 250 deaths in China.