Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced that the social media giant is ending its long-running “fact-check” system. Good riddance. The system had given rise to a censorship regime used by partisans and ideologues to silence their opponents and by self-dealing experts to shield themselves from scrutiny — all under the guise of a supposedly “neutral” process.

How do I know? Because I repeatedly faced the business end of the system as the comment editor of the New York Post during the pandemic and the 2020 election — one of the most turbulent and contentious periods in US national life.

The most notorious instance of this involved the Post’s Hunter Biden laptop exposé, first published on 14 October, 2020. More than four years later, most people remember how Twitter (now X) banned the story, even preventing users from sharing it in private messages. But Facebook’s censors took the first step.

At about 11 a.m. that day a communications staffer at Facebook named Andy Stone posted a statement that read: “I want be [sic] clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.” Before joining Facebook, Stone had served as a staffer for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Yet he insisted that Facebook’s action was “part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation.”

While the laptop-censorship affair shocked many Americans, my then-colleagues and I had grown accustomed to such sinister behaviour from the platform — and got an inside look at the workings of the system.

In February 2020, for example, my then-Post colleague Margi Conklin published a column by Steven Mosher, an author and critic of the Chinese regime, who urged Western officials to be wary of Beijing’s claim that the novel-coronavirus outbreak originated at a wet market in Wuhan.

This was an opinion piece, and Mosher didn’t definitively assert that Covid had leaked from a lab. He merely pointed out that “in all of China, there is only one” lab handling advanced coronaviruses. “And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan that just happens to be … the epicentre of the epidemic.” Given the Chinese government’s history of covering up catastrophic errors, Mosher argued, scepticism was warranted.

As the story gained wide circulation, Facebook’s “fact-checkers” interdicted it. If you posted the story, you’d see a “False Information” alert near the link with a note explaining that the piece had been “checked by independent fact-checkers.” Your friends couldn’t click through the underlying Post link; nor could they share it.

Who were these “independent fact-checkers”? We would learn the answer some two months later. One was Danielle E. Anderson, an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who had conducted experiments at the Wuhan virology institute and collaborated with its scientists. This was a clear conflict of interest: scientists, after all, don’t like to embarrass institutions that host their research. Sure enough, in her note calling for the censorship, Anderson said she was personally familiar with the Wuhan lab’s “strict control and containment measures.” Right.

Another fact-checker wrote that censorship was merited by the fact that “any responsible government would strengthen safety and security procedures in high-containment labs that will and should be working with the novel coronavirus to develop countermeasures and diagnostics.” But this was classic circular reasoning: as Mosher had pointed out in his original piece, the Chinese government had proved pretty, well, unreasonable, in previous outbreaks of the kind. Eventually, Facebook would ban all “lab-leak” stories — that is, until May 2021, when President Biden directed the Intelligence Community to look into the lab-leak hypothesis.

So does this mean we are about to enter a new golden age of free speech and inquiry on social media? Probably not. A handful of oligarchs and their managerial underlings still control the digital public square. Unfortunately, having fought pandemic-era censorship, too many conservatives have lost interest in reining in this vast private power — now that “one of their own” is in charge of one of the platforms.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the New York Post editor who commissioned Steven Mosher’s original February 2020, lab-leak column.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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