Causing panic

Prolific anti-vaccine doctor temporarily banned on Truth Social, causing panic among Trump fans

Katie Dowd

Frustration and anger swirled among die hard Trump supporters after a prolific anti-vaccine doctor was briefly suspended last week on the former president’s social media platform Truth Social. It’s another chapter in the rocky beginning of Truth Social, the company that California Rep. Devin Nunes left Congress to run. After launching only for Apple users, the app's downloads have been low, its tech problems persistent and its very existence threatened by Elon Musk's plan to buy Twitter.

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny is one of the most influential anti-vaccine voices on the internet. The Ohio osteopath was named one of the “disinformation dozen” by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which found 12 accounts responsible for spreading the majority of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation online. She also went viral last year for telling an Ohio House committee that COVID-19 vaccines cause people to become human magnets.

“They can put a key on their forehead, it sticks,” she said. “They can put spoons and forks all over them, and they can stick."

After being kicked off most mainstream social media platforms, Tenpenny has found a consistent following on sites popular on the right, like Gab, Telegram and Truth Social. But her account went dark last week on Truth Social, causing much consternation among her fans.

“Is this true? It needs to be called out! I am not able to get on TS, but have a lot of $ invested. This bears an explanation!” wrote one angry commenter on a popular QAnon forum.

“Seems like CEO Devin Nunes is destroying Truthsocial by doing this kind of thing,” blamed another. 

"I didn't know it was possible to get booted off of Truth Social unless it was something clearly illegal, pornographic or threatening violence," added one person who clearly did not read the site's terms of service; the company reserves the right to terminate accounts of “any person for any reason or for no reason.”

The sudden, unexplained banning made its way through the far-right blogosphere, where breathless writers speculated as to why Tenpenny was booted. The most common theory is that Donald Trump, to their general consternation, has repeatedly encouraged people to get vaccinated and touted the success of Operation Warp Speed, which expedited the creation and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines under his administration. Perhaps that promotion of vaccines had run into a conflict with Tenpenny's relentless anti-vaccine rhetoric, they theorized.

For her part, Tenpenny kept posting on other platforms, including one cryptic meme that merely said: "The saddest thing about betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies." 

In the end, though, it was all a false alarm. 

"My #TruthSocial account was reinstated today through no action of my own!" Tenpenny excitedly posted on Telegram on June 8. "They claim it was done by a technical error of some type!"

Although conspiracy theorists may be assuaged by her explanation, it doesn't explain why Truth Social is apparently so buggy that is suspending users at random for days at a time.