September 13, 2023

With COVID back, censorship is back, and now it’s taken a particularly dangerous form, not just on social media, but on leading academic exchanges.

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The huge Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN), run by Netherlands-based publishing house Elsevier, is not a site most people know about, but it is a behemoth in academia, extremely important to professors for getting their work out there and advancing within the academic community.

That’s where censorship on COVID is happening, which could have far-reaching consequences for public policy and the free exchange of ideas.

SSRN’s plain, bare-bones front page on its site describes itself this way:

Tomorrow´s Research Today

SSRN provides 1,265,565 research papers from 1,365,420 researchers in 70 disciplines.

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Basically, SSRN is a gigantic library of all the respectable academic research out there, a Google of sorts for academia. Every academic paper worth its salt appears there. It’s the go-to site for all respectable academic working papers and the actual peer-reviewed published papers that follow from them, plus the reactions to the papers once the research is out there. Every assistant professor seeking a full professorship at universities follows this site closely.

With its near-monopoly status, either the government has coopted it, or it has slowly come to the realization that it can throw its weight around with politically motivated censorship.

So now we see some very odd censorship occurring there: 

An important meta-study, or study of studies, on the efficacy of lockdowns worldwide, titled “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,” which was later published as a peer-reviewed book titled “Did Lockdowns Work? The Verdict on Covid Restrictions” by the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, was effectively censored by the SSRN, just as the government has been caught meddling in other kinds of censorship related to COVID, and is out talking up COVID again.

The authors of the meta-study were none other than academic heavyweights Steve H. Hanke, professor of applied economics and founder and co-director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University, Lars Jonung, professor emeritus of economics at Lund University in Lund, Sweden, and Jonas Herby, special advisor for the Centre for Political Studies in Copenhagen. They began their research by following standard operating procedures: they published a detailed, nine-page protocol entitled “Protocol for ‘What Does the First XX Studies Tell Us about the Effects of Lockdowns on Mortality? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of COVID-19 Lockdowns’” on SSRN. After completing their research, Hanke, Jonung, and Herby published a first and second edition of their work as working papers in the Johns Hopkins “Studies in Applied Economics” series. Both editions were mysteriously stonewalled by SSRN. The researchers repeatedly received the following rejection notice from SSRN:

 “Given the need to be cautious about posting medical content, SSRN is selective on the papers we post. Unfortunately, your paper has not been accepted for posting on SSRN.”

This all has the smell of censorship. First and foremost, SSRN had already published the researchers’ protocol. And, to add insult to injury, the SSRN had also published Nicolas Banholzer el al.’s critique of the researchers’ second edition of their working paper, a working paper which the SSRN refused to publish. Subsequently, Hanke, Jonung, and Herby published a Johns Hopkins “Studies in Applied Economics” working paper in reply to Banholzer et al.’s critique. The SSRN also refused to publish the Hanke-Jonung-Herby reply to Banholzer et al., again citing “the need to be cautious about posting medical content.”