For the last year, Facebook has acted like it’s the cop charged with enforcing the liberal media’s wishes.
Posts questioning coronavirus restrictions were slapped with a “false information” warning. Planned events that violated social distancing orders were banned (as long as they weren’t anti-police riots), and certain topics that leftists didn’t like were removed from the platform completely. The company claimed these policies were necessary to prevent the spread of misinformation during a time of uncertainty, but it turns out all they did was reveal Facebook’s ridiculous, over-reaching bias.
Facebook confirmed this week it will no longer remove posts that assert the coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a practice the company adopted the moment leftist journalists and scientists wrongly dismissed it as a baseless conspiracy theory. But now that many of those same journalists and scientists are being forced to walk back their initial derision, Facebook is doing the same.
What’s so troubling is that none of the facts have changed. There was always much more circumstantial evidence supporting the lab leak theory than there was evidence supporting a natural emergence of the virus. A 2018 State Department report had previously revealed that U.S. diplomats had been extremely concerned about the lab conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, given the dangerous research it was undertaking. They warned the lab’s unsafe practices posed a threat to public health. We knew about this last year, and it isn’t hard to connect the dots.
Another State Department investigation, led by the Trump administration late last year, alleged that WIV researchers were conducting dangerous experiments on coronaviruses that may have resulted in the creation of the exact COVID-19 strain that spread to the rest of the world. Add this “gain-of-function” research to the lab’s notoriously unsafe practices, and the pieces start to come together.
So why did Facebook dismiss these reports as “false information?” Why did it shut down debate about a subject that was still being investigated?
Because that’s what the Left wanted. As soon as the media decided the lab leak theory had been “debunked” (Spoiler: It was not), Facebook started tagging posts about the Wuhan lab with fact-check warnings that told users the theory was “false.” Just a few weeks ago, the platform was slapping these warnings on an article written by respected science journalist Nicholas Wade, who explained why the lab leak theory is plausible.
Not one of the media publications or so-called experts who declared the lab leak theory to be false were ever able to provide evidence disproving it. Most of them didn’t even bother investigating it.
Now that President Joe Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci and other members of the liberal elite have decided they cannot keep dismissing the lab leak theory, the media and their social media lackeys over at Facebook have agreed to let the conversation take place. Gee, thanks, guys.
And keep this incident in mind every time Facebook tries to tell you what is fact and what isn’t about any other topic. They don’t have a clue — they just blindly take their cues from Democrats.
