How Facebook censored the lab leak theory

What has been truly disturbing about the response to Covid-19 in the West is not so much that our governments copied what the Chinese government did, with lockdowns, but that the media did what the Chinese media did, with suppression of any narrative not congenial to the powers-that-be.
The Chinese media have an excuse – you’d end up in gaol writing too independently.
The mainstream media in the West, including newer media manifestations such as Facebook have no excuse whatsoever. Their behaviour has been contemptible.
It is pitiful that Donald Trump talked more truth than our free press. Absolutely pitiful.

Far be it from me to defend FB, but weren’t they simply falling in line with the official mainstream narrative and therefore, isn’t it the the sudden change by and hypocrisy of those espousing and determining this narrative that is the real story here? We were all told we were delusional to think C19 was man-made. The WHO told us, as did our trusted scientists (the ones we were supposed to listen to, at any rate), as did Biden, as did all the MSM, and they all kow-towed to the CCP. Trump was a racist, remember? This is real 1984 stuff when they can bend reality with such ease, and we’re all supposed to forget the words they stood by only a few short months ago. It’s like globally coordinated gaslighting.

Social networks should have to choose between being regulated as publishers or as telecoms platforms. They’d have to choose the latter and, like telephone companies, would have no right – nor duty – to censor anything. If a post breaks the law, let it be up to the authorities to point it out and ask for its removal.

Facebook is merely an unelected, unaccountable law unto itself. It clearly doesn’t give a toss what people think about its pronouncements.
It simply suppresses any ideas or stories that it doesn’t like and gives undue attention to its own pet causes.
Thus the Russia/Trump nonsense was allowed to be speculated on for years. But any suggestion that there is a Biden/Ukraine link was quickly suppressed.
Cancel culture is one of the Left’s favourite weapons, but Facebook is doing it on a worldwide stage. It really needs reining in at some point.

Not just FB. Also LinkedIn and YouTube, the latter of which took the extraordinary step of taking down the video of a Senate committee hearing where an MD was talking about the use of Ivermectin. In the US, we keep being lectured how “it’s only censorship if govt does it,” which may have legal standing but is otherwise nonsense.
Free speech isn’t just a matter of law, it’s part of a larger societal construct to promote the exchange of ideas. FB and others have appointed themselves gatekeepers in stifling this exchange, and many in govt are quite happy to outsource the job of silencing critics to entities who can get away with it.

Anywhere Nick Clegg is involved is bound to be a disaster characterised by incompetence, wokeness and dishonesty.

In the crux of an idea of freedom of speech is not relation between the state and individual, but, between the power and individual. If power to supress individual freedom is clout by private entities with sufficient leverage to restrain the individual freedoms the law should act upon. This is more so if a company effectively controls traffic of information, data and ideas.

Facebook is a cancer on our democracy – along with the the cellpool that is twitter. Facebook should be made strictly legally liable for every single thing posted on their site. Yes, they would probably go out of business. Tough.

I think only incitement to direct and immediate violence should be censored – with everything else it’s a case of ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ as my latin teacher used to say nearly 70 years ago, proving that this problem is as old as time.

I deleted my FB account a few years ago and have never regretted doing so or missed it, in fact I had a sense of relief having done so. I would recommend others to try it, there is life outside social media, and it’s good.

Facebook’s Covid-19 policy is very odd. Had not read it before Freddie’s article. Many of the things it bans have changed over time.
“Claims that the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 are much lower than the official figure (requires additional information and/or context)” Carl Heneghan pointed out death recording had problems last year and it was changed.
“Claims that wearing a face mask does not help prevent the spread of COVID-19”. We were being told not to wear them early last year.
“Claims that COVID-19 vaccines kill or seriously harm people (such as causing blood clots)”. Pretty certain clots kill some, though a very small number of, people.
There are many others

I never joined Facebook or spent any time on its website. And I never will.
But I have spent the occasional hour writing comments on New York Times articles, including a couple of hours last night on an opinion piece by Charles Blow on the “insurrection” at the Capitol on January 6.
In a comment I made the point, delicately rather than stridently, that it’s hard to call the event an insurrection when no one has been charged with that crime (under 18 USC § 2383 — Rebellion or insurrection). A couple of other commentators countered my point, and we had a good discussion going.
My comment disappeared during the night. So did the 7 or 8 comments under it. They’re all gone.
The New York Times says that “comments are moderated for civility”. My comments were civil, and were posted by the Times accordingly after moderation. However, the Times also says that readers can also flag comments: “If a comment is inappropriate, contains deliberate misinformation, or you suspect that a comment has been posted by a political propaganda network, please flag that comment for spam.”
As one of the rare conservatives who comment on the New York Times, I see my comments removed regularly. Though most comments survive, if I contend that there was no insurrection on January 6, that comment does not last long. If I argue that there is little evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns, masks and handwashing help mitigate the Covid-19 epidemic, my argument disappears.
I can understand the liberal bent of the New York Times, even though I think it should be more liberal in allowing conservative opinions from commenters. Facebook, though, seems like it should be different. More moderate in its moderation. More and more, it’s not.

Congratulation World you have all been Zuckered by Mr Zuckerberg organization!!

Who, though, is listening? Zuckerberg? Doesn’t look like it.
There is a question the world’s governments should be asking themselves: how necessary is Facebook?
It is just a platform at the end of the day, a place where people hang out. Does it need to provide news?

My guess is that governments want to keep Facebook happy for the same reason the UK government doesn’t want to ditch the BBC – it is, potentially, a useful propaganda channel.

In order to be able to expand into every corner of human life Facebook in turn keeps governments happy by showing willing to censor information that is not government approved.

It is an unholy alliance. It ought to be possible for a government (hello Australia) to tell facebook it cannot provide news in its country. Others may follow suit. It hardly matters if governments like the Chinese or Russian permit Facebook to disseminate approved news since it makes the company just another arm of the state broadcaster. It matters to us, though, because if we are not careful the endgame is countries like China deciding what news we can receive.

“we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”
Is that true, then, that Covid was manufactured from Facebook apps? Wow, no wonder they wanted to keep that quiet.
What’s worse, idiots or idiots who can’t construct sentences?

Umm, the lab escape hypothesis, for which both the US intelligence establishment and the WHO want to see China allow proper investigation on account of obvious safety issues, doesn’t subsume any claims the virus is artificial. It just proposes that an unrecognized infection occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology during studies of SARS-like bat coronaviruses the lab is known to have been engaged in shortly before the pandemic started. Not hard to see how: Covid often leads to vague, nonspecific symptoms and this happened in the middle of flu season. So a worker got infected and went home to infect family, and it took almost a month for public health to notice the cases of atypical pneumonia that followed. Hospitals, especially in a city where the air is as bad as it is in Wuhan, treat a bevy of patients for respiratory problems every winter.
I don’t recommend getting news from Zuckerberg’s empire of rancor, confusion and secrecy, a website once intended to help college students keep in touch with friends—I still remember the “Facebook wall” users put their mementos on about 12 years ago. If curious, silent censorship can be detected by asking someone who’s not befriended you on the site if they can see your posts.
The top multidisciplinary journals Science in the US and Nature in the UK have reported suspicions regarding the WIV since April 2020; Science finally carried an open letter on the matter with China stalling so long. They rate the hypothesis unlikely but not improbable enough to dismiss out of hand. But we shouldn’t forget the element of national pride here. Would America turn over samples from its US Army AMRIID on the WHO’s request while submission raised a firestorm in our media, even if a new disease had spread from Maryland to Shanghai?

FB was meant to be a way for college age people to socialize. The problem is that as social media spread, FB never really grew up. They sought to be immature and petty regarding opinions with which the FB heirarchy disagreed, which is fine when you’re twenty-something, but an attitude one should outgrow by the time they reach 30. The problem is the original users think they should be able to surround themselves only with people and opinions they like. As my Mom told me when I was 14-you aren’t the bellybutton of the Universe. The ability to read all sides and make a qualified judgement is a critical part of maturity. How fragile are those values if some anonymous editor feels the need to shut down all opposing views? As Americans, we used to be better than this. Instead of being the means of conveying ideas, FB administrators seek to be the originators. That’s not the way this freedom thing works.

Sentient Android #6 needs his power cell disconnected, permanently.

What is alarming for me as that the constitutional law basics of law school should trigger a conversation that the first amendment does apply to social media platforms. I’ve been stunned that such critiques are rare and in fact the newspapers carry columns stating why it doesn’t apply. This itself is disinformation. Once you open your business to the public, constitutional scrutiny is triggered. If this wasn’t so, you could still have country clubs banning Jews. This is basic. When it comes to the first amendment, the US Supreme Court in its seminal case Pruneyard v. Robbins, a case out of California, held, “..First Amendment does not prevent a private shopping center owner from prohibiting the distribution on center premises of handbills unrelated to the center’s operations — does not ex proprio vigore limit a State’s authority to exercise its police power or its sovereign right to adopt in its own constitution individual liberties more expansive than those conferred by the Federal Constitution.” Important to note is that the Supreme Court held that a state can confer additional first amendment protection. This is what Florida is doing. Accordingly I think they have a right to reign in the social media platforms. The question will be if it is tailored enough to withstand constitutional scrutiny.

At what point do beople get arrested?

So… I seem to remember Zuckerberg just wanting to be left alone and Congress hauling him in to answer questions about why Facebook was allowing “misinformation” to be posted. What else was he suppossed to do in the face of governmental threats?

Farcebooks wokery knows no bounds, whilst we are distracted they’ve changed their algorithms and any comment that shows your a thinker and/or not hard left means comments made sometimes years ago are being hidden and you get a ‘warning’ against you, I fully expect to get banned shortly once enough ‘warnings’ have been accumulated.