One of Alaska's best is the latest casualty of misinformation

Reporter Matt Buxton has been slapped by social media giant Twitter for transcribing public testimony given at last night's meeting of the Anchorage Assembly. This isn't the first time that Twitter has erroneously taken action against Buxton's Twitter account and placed him in an involuntary timeout for reporting matters of public interest.

In February, Buxton, who has covered Alaska state politics for a decade, saw his Twitter account temporarily suspended after sharing public comments made by covid conspiracy theorist Sen. Lora Reinbold who at the time had engaged Department of Health and Social Services Commissioner Adam Crum in a line of questioning about the availability of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine as potential treatments for COVID-19.

Buxton wrote about his latest Twitter suspension here. He is known for his excellent live blogging of government meetings, which draws a high level of engagement from his nearly 5,000-strong Twitter following. Buxton's Twitter account was locked specifically for "violating the policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19."

On Wednesday morning, I clipped the public testimony Buxton had partly transcribed and shared it to Twitter with an explanation as to how it was pertinent to his improper suspension. As of this writing, the video has been viewed over 3,000 times. Reporters, journalists, and bloggers have called on Twitter to remedy its improper suspension of Buxton's account.

Buxton's jailing by Blue Bird highlights the obstacles and pitfalls of reporting on the deadly misinformation Republicans have chosen to weaponize. It's all part of a political strategy to stoke fear into the hearts and minds of those susceptible to conspiracy theories — a blatantly false and dangerous narrative that wrongfully asserts Progressives are trying to control people through covid related mandates.

The inescapable irony is that the Alaska Republican Party, in lockstep with Jim Minnery and the politically active Alaska Baptist Temple, is making every possible effort to control individuals through organized religion where they are conditioned from a young age to adhere to a perverted patriarchal form of morality that results in people drawing the conclusion they possess the god given right to infect people with a highly contagious and deadly virus because freedom and because god. Protecting others through vaccines and mandates isn't a godly trait, it would seem.

Here in Anchorage, the assault on science and commonsense has been on full display for over a year. The Anchorage Assembly has been besieged by anti-government militia members and conspiracy theorists associated with an affiliated network of social media groups such as Save Anchorage, Open Alaska, Taking Back Anchorage, and Alaskans For Constitutional Rights, where administrators and moderators (with help from a certain far-right Assemblyperson) are content to let Alaskans (and quite a number of outsiders) smother themselves in their own shit-infused cesspool of conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment which then gets live-streamed on the Muni's Youtube channel and on television sets across the city where it's then normalized.

Some of these groups are well funded, backed by individuals who have an extra $10,000 laying around to spend on public records requests or the money to hire private investigators to track down local bloggers who work to expose the misdeeds of local politicians and their cronies as they masquerade under the guise of a "grassroots" effort that only pretends to care about our city.

The goal of these groups is to take over the city politically and institute a twisted form of Libertarianism — and they're working to accomplish this by allowing their members to repeatedly share misinformation within their hidden shithole groups who then march to an assembly meeting with the goal of repeatedly spreading it in front of television cameras as factual.

Save Anchorage members can literally call for "civil war" in the group, and Facebook looks the other way. Repeat what their members say, however, and you'll find your social media accounts in peril for "misinformation" or "inciting violence." Alaska politicians have also become proficient at perpetuating these conspiracy theories, which their social media armies then parrot on social media — full blast.

As Matt Buxton has repeatedly encountered, merely reporting what someone says (public interest) at a government meeting can run you afoul of a social media platform's algorithm and this is to the detriment of those who rely on factual real-time information to help form opinions and to stay abreast of how these losers are shaping local politics. Silencing reporters who are working to inform the public about those who spread baseless allegations of election fraud and covid-related conspiracy theories is exactly what the far-right wants.

What happens at government meetings — what is said and, importantly, the origins of what is presented as "testimony" at those meetings - is of public interest. Not everyone in the city has the time, inclination, or endurance to sit through a seven-hour-long Anchorage Assembly meeting where lunacy abounds. People want highlights, i.e., what was said, what happened, and what the end result was. Forcing those who report on such matters to "dance around" the subject matter by watering down the words of those who seek to divide Anchorage is wrong and anti-democratic. If you can't repeat what was said, how can you report the truth?

For what it's worth — I hope Buxton, who appears to be wrestling with how to proceed after his second Twitter suspension, doesn't stop reporting on the subject of misinformation. His reporting is invaluable for those who care deeply about Anchorage and those who value truth.