January 7, 2025 – 3:25pm
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the social media giant is ending its long-standing “fact-checking” system. Good riddance. This system had given rise to a regime of censorship used by partisans and ideologues to silence their opponents and by conflict-of-interest experts to protect themselves from scrutiny — all under the guise of a so-called “process”. neutral “.
How do I know? Because I have been confronted several times with the commercial aspect of this system as editor-in-chief of the comments of the New York Post during the pandemic and the 2020 election — one of the most turbulent and controversial periods in American national life.
The most notorious example of this involves Hunter Biden’s laptop briefing released by the Postfirst published on October 14, 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 censors took the first step.
Around 11 a.m. that day, a Facebook communications staffer named Andy Stone issued a statement that read: “I want [être] [sic] clear that this story is eligible to be verified 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 Senator Barbara Boxer of California and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Still, he insisted that Facebook’s action was “part of our standard process for reducing the spread of misinformation.” »
While the Laptop censorship affair shocked many Americans, my colleagues at the time and I had grown accustomed to such sinister behavior from the platform — and gained insight into how the system.
In February 2020, for example, I published a column from Post by Steven Mosher, an author and critic of the Chinese regime, who has urged Western officials to be wary of Beijing’s claim that the coronavirus outbreak originated in a wet market in Wuhan.
This was an opinion piece, and Mosher did not definitively state that Covid leaked from a laboratory. He simply pointed out that “in all of China, there is only one” laboratory dealing with advanced coronaviruses. “And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan which happens to be… the epicenter of the epidemic. » Given the Chinese government’s history of covering up catastrophic mistakes, Mosher argued that skepticism was justified.
As the story gained circulation, Facebook’s “fact checkers” banned it. If you published the story, you would see a “False Information” alert near the link with a note explaining that the article had been “verified by independent fact-checkers.” » Your friends could not click on the underlying link of the Post ; nor could they share it.
Who were these “independent fact-checkers”? We would learn the answer about two months later. One of them was Danielle E. Anderson, an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who had conducted experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and collaborated with its scientists. It was a clear conflict of interest: scientists, after all, don’t like to embarrass the institutions that host their research. Of course, in her memo calling for censorship, Anderson said she was personally aware of the Wuhan lab’s “strict control and containment measures.” All right.
Another fact-checker wrote that the censorship was justified by the fact that “any responsible government would strengthen safety and security procedures in high-security laboratories that would and should work with the novel coronavirus to develop countermeasures and diagnostics. » But it was classic circular reasoning: as Mosher had pointed out in his original article, the Chinese government had proven itself to be rather, how shall I put it, unreasonable, during previous epidemics of this type. Eventually, Facebook banned all “lab leak” stories — that is, until May 2021, when President Biden ordered the intelligence community to look into the lab leak hypothesis .
So does this mean we are about to enter a new golden era of free speech and investigation on social media? Probably not. A handful of oligarchs and their managerial underlings still control the digital public space. Unfortunately, after fighting pandemic-era censorship, too many conservatives have lost interest in harnessing this vast private power — now that “one of their own” is in charge of one of the platforms.
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