{"id":261297,"date":"2021-05-28T03:39:48","date_gmt":"2021-05-28T00:39:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/facebook-and-its-censorious-fact-checkers-have-utterly-discredited-themselves\/"},"modified":"2021-05-28T03:39:48","modified_gmt":"2021-05-28T00:39:48","slug":"facebook-and-its-censorious-fact-checkers-have-utterly-discredited-themselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/facebook-and-its-censorious-fact-checkers-have-utterly-discredited-themselves\/","title":{"rendered":"#Facebook and its censorious ‘fact-checkers’ have utterly discredited themselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Facebook<\/a> and its censorious ‘fact-checkers’ have utterly discredited themselves<\/strong>”
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Is there something in the California water that makes Silicon Valley\u2019s censorious dweebs so damned shameless?<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Facebook \u00adrevised its policy of banning posts suggesting the coronavirus was man-made \u2014 because the COVID situation is, er, \u201cevolving,\u201d as a spokesman told Politico.<\/p>\n

Gee, thanks. The flip-flop comes more than a year after the social-media giant banned a well-reasoned Post opinion column by China scholar Steven Mosher that speculated about a potential lab leak. Will our columnist receive an apology? Of course not. But it\u2019s the American people who should be holding the Menlo Park \u00adtyrants to account.<\/p>\n

Think about it: If you were Xi Jinping, and you wanted to deploy an information-control operation over the origins of COVID-19, you couldn\u2019t have done better than to just let Facebook, working in conjunction with America\u2019s bottom-feeding \u201cfact-checking\u201d industry, do its thing.<\/p>\n

The Chi-Coms, after all, were held in odium in the US eye long before the first COVID cases arrived: How much more effective \u2014 and devious \u2014 to have a gazillion-dollar US tech firm shut down public inquiry into the \u00advirus\u2019 origins, and that with the help of well-credentialed \u201cexperts\u201d and \u201cfact-checkers.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth returning to what Mosher wrote to see how shameful Facebook\u2019s censorship was. For starters, note that Mosher didn\u2019t definitively claim that COVID-19 had leaked from a lab. What he argued, rather, is that a lab leak should be plausible to anyone familiar with Chinese \u00adrealities. Among the pieces of \u00adevidence he marshaled:<\/p>\n

\u2022 The fact that Xi himself had, in the early days of the crisis, warned about \u201clab safety\u201d as a national-security priority.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The fact that, following Xi\u2019s guidance, \u201cthe Chinese Ministry of Science<\/a> and Technology<\/a> \u00adreleased a new directive titled: \u2018Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in \u00admicrobiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Above all, the fact that the Middle Kingdom has only one Level 4 microbiology lab that can \u201chandle deadly coronaviruses\u201d \u2014 and that lab just happ<\/a>ens to be located at the \u201cepicenter of the epidemic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Set aside any other scientific questions about the virus (many remain unresolved): Didn\u2019t it at least merit some thought that the country\u2019s sole coronavirus lab is located at the outbreak\u2019s ground zero?<\/p>\n

Even if Mosher were wrong \u2014 and a growing number of US \u00adsecurity officials and top scientists are coming around to his side \u2014 didn\u2019t Americans and their policy makers have the right to consider the possibility? The virus\u2019 true origins, after all, would inform any number of concrete decisions, not least whether Beijing and the curiously Beijing-subservient World Health Organization deserved US cooperation.<\/p>\n

But no. Facebook and its \u00ad\u201cexperts\u201d knew better and moved to suppress a vital column, distorting the US debate when it mattered most.<\/p>\n

Oh, about those \u201cexperts,\u201d whose testimony was used to justify the ban: At least one of them \u2014 Danielle E. Anderson, an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore \u2014 regularly collaborated with the Wuhan virologists, hardly an unconflicted source.<\/p>\n

Another \u201cexpert\u201d insisted that no \u201cresponsible\u201d government would permit such deadly leaks, and the quaint assumption that China ranks among responsible governments was enough to merit banning Mosher\u2019s column to her mind.<\/p>\n

Similarly dubious \u201cexpert\u201d claims, amplified by partisan \u201cfact-checking\u201d outfits like Politifact, were used to frame as conspiracy nuts anyone who dared warn of a potential lab leak. (Politifact has now quietly taken down its \u00addenunciation of Fox News<\/a>\u2019 Tucker Carlson as a leading conspiracy theorist on this issue.)<\/p>\n

This pattern of Big Tech censorship, enabled by unaccountable \u201cfact-checkers,\u201d poses a catastrophic danger to America\u2019s ability to govern herself and respond to crises.<\/p>\n

The problem isn\u2019t just that it leaves ordinary Americans in the dark, but that it insulates elites themselves from uncomfortable realities \u2014 such as the possibility that their beloved Chinese trading partner might be responsible for a pandemic that cost millions of lives.<\/p>\n

Enough is enough. Facebook and the other Big Tech giants are irreformable. Only political action \u2014 in the form of removing the special status that allows them to act like publishers without any of a traditional publisher\u2019s liabilities \u2014 can save us from this private tyranny.<\/p>\n

Sohrab Ahmari is The Post\u2019s op-ed editor and author of the new book \u201cThe Unbroken Thread<\/a>: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Twitter: @SohrabAhmari<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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“#Facebook and its censorious ‘fact-checkers’ have utterly discredited themselves” Is there something in the California water that makes Silicon Valley\u2019s censorious dweebs so damned shameless? On Wednesday, Facebook \u00adrevised its policy of banning posts suggesting the coronavirus was man-made \u2014 because the COVID situation is, er, \u201cevolving,\u201d as a spokesman told Politico. Gee, thanks. The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":261298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/05\/facebook-coronavirus-posts.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[107443,32128,4973,1545,4974,73816],"class_list":["post-261297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-5-27-21","tag-censorship","tag-china","tag-coronavirus","tag-facebook","tag-free-speech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}