Controversial neuroradiologist and former White House COVID-19 advisor Scott Atlas, MD, deleted his Twitter account on Tuesday amid a purge of users on the popular social media site.
Atlas confirmed the move to STAT news this week, noting that the platform’s decision to expel some 70,000 users after the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill influenced his thinking.
“In my view, Twitter has become a destructive place that mainly inflames extreme thinking and disseminates distortions, rather than elucidating factual information and respectful, civilized discussion,” the senior fellow at Stanford’s conservative-leaning Hoover Institution told STAT, noting that he had lost some 12,000 followers as of Monday night.
Atlas himself stoked controversy on Twitter in November, urging Michigan residents to “rise up” against strict lockdown measures, which he had railed against while part of the administration. The blowback from that statement led to the Stanford Faculty Senate issuing a resolution “strongly condemning” his comments. Atlas asserted that he did not intend to incite violence, only encourage Americans to “peacefully protest.”
He formally resigned from his post on Nov. 30, with his 130-day temporary employment set to expire.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.