Facebook has now claimed that its permanent ban on Heroes of Liberty — a children’s book publisher specializing in biographies of such figures as former President Ronald Reagan, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and economist Thomas Sowell — was simply “an error.”
In the absence of some further explanation of what the error was, this is a completely unsatisfactory explanation.
What appears to have happened in reality is that one of Facebook’s many rabid leftist employees pulled the trigger to censor conservative content, a story as common in the world of social media as turkey is at Thanksgiving dinner.
In this case, Facebook actually took ad money from Heroes of Liberty and then refused to show its advertisements, supposedly on the grounds that its product was “low quality” or “disruptive.”
There is no reason to think that this company’s work product is either of those things. Yet somehow, Facebook not only flagged the material but also denied the company’s appeal and instituted a permanent ban. This means that an actual human being working for this social media company looked at this case and consciously decided to discriminate against a conservative children’s book publisher.
Shocking, right?
An “error” is a mistake in adding numbers, a misplaced punctuation mark, or an accidental sending of an email to the wrong John Smith. But one can hardly call it an “error” that Facebook, Twitter, and other Big Tech companies consistently discriminate against conservative viewpoints and ban conservatives any time there is even the remotest potential justification.
Social media companies often decry as “conspiracy theories” the mere statement of facts that liberals dislike, which often turn out later to be indisputably true. Consider, for example, just three examples: the New York Post’s accurate preelection story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the lab-leak theory of the novel coronavirus, and the failure of the coronavirus vaccines to stop the spread of COVID. The promotion of these ideas was enough to get one banned from one or all social media platforms just a few short weeks or months ago. Today, these are universally acknowledged as fact, except by a few conspiracy-theorist holdouts.
Meanwhile, social media companies made no effort at all to resist the publication of genuine hoaxes, such as the conspiracy theory that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in order to steal the 2016 election. Imagine that — a double standard on how social media companies apply their rules.
Traditionally, the way people have grappled with disinformation, falsehood, and fallacy is to have more debate, not less. This is the tried-and-true lesson of the First Amendment, which protects from show trials those who hold opinions that are unpopular at the moment.
Recently, Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist and an expert in mRNA vaccines who pioneered the research that showed the concept was possible, was banned from Twitter. Malone is not some kind of anti-vaccine fanatic spreading conspiracy theories — indeed, he has received the COVID vaccine himself and encourages others to do so. Yet he was banned for sharing now-deleted messages that some self-styled expert at a social media company decided might encourage vaccine hesitancy.
It would be very difficult to find someone who knows more about mRNA vaccines than Malone. He is a true research scientist with accomplishments that most of the world’s scientists would envy. Yet when he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, YouTube took it upon itself to prevent the interview or any clips of it from being posted on its platform as well. Apparently, it is impossible even for those supportive of mRNA vaccines to have a free and open discussion about them. Apparently, the only acceptable message on social media is that vaccines are the only answer to COVID and that they have no trade-offs.
“The policy that’s being implemented is one in which no discussion of the risks are allowed because, by definition, they will elicit vaccine hesitance,” Malone told Rogan in the course of explaining his views. “But that’s the fundamental backbone of informed consent, so informed consent is not only not happening — it’s being actively blocked.”
Big Tech giants are only undermining their own credibility and encouraging more conspiracy theories when they shut down reasonable debate. Perhaps they should show more faith in the truth of their beliefs by letting people they disagree with communicate.
