How Facebook censored the lab leak theory

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How Facebook censored the lab leak theory
Its latest crackdown on 'misinformation' proves the tech giant hasn't learnt its lesson
by Freddie Sayers
May 31, 2021

Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.

The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.

“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”

In other words, Facebook now believes that its censorship of millions of posts in the preceding months had been in error. There was, of course, no hint of apology in its most recent statment; though its tone proved quite the contrast to Facebook’s boast last year that, in April alone, it displayed “warnings” on 50 million “pieces of content related to Covid-19”. That was just the start; in February this year, Facebook even placed a warning on a piece for UnHerd by Ian Birrell, an award-winning investigative reporter who has been writing about the origins of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.
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Yet this climate of censorship was, in many ways, inevitable; what else are we to expect from a global corporation that has the power to determine what are “facts”, and then police them into existence? As for the murky practice of shadow-banning, it seems inevitable that it will only add to the atmosphere of conspiracy and mistrust surrounding debates over Covid-19.

Big Tech got its “misinformation” policy wrong on the lab leak hypothesis — and, if its behaviour in the past week is any indication, it hasn’t learnt its lesson.

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