While Mark Zuckerberg Regrets the Establishment Asked Facebook to Censor Factually Accurate Covid Info, They Still Do It
While Mark Zuckerberg Regrets the Establishment Asked Facebook to Censor Factually Accurate Covid Info, They Still Do It
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and head of its parent company Meta, said in an interview recently that they had removed truthful content from the platform at the establishment's request.
Zuckerberg recently gave an interview where, among other matters, he briefly touched upon Facebook's efforts to prevent "misinformation". He noted that this work can sometimes be "really tricky". As an example, Zuckerberg cited posts related to Covid. "And, unfortunately, I think a lot of the establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts, asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true," he said. "It really undermines trust," Zuckerberg added.
That the US administration was closely and extensively monitoring information posted about Covid and demanding that social media companies to censor posts deemed inappropriate by officials became public knowledge already at the end of last summer. In President Joe Biden's administration, 12 agencies and more than 50 officials were involved in the censorship machine.
The White House also publicly pressured social media companies. In July 2021, Biden said that "misinformation" shared on social media was "killing people".
The censorship machine worked effectively
In reality, the Facebook censorship machine was working effectively even before Biden's rants. The 'misinfo' about Covid was tackled already in early 2020, and in April of the same year it was announced that Facebook was working with more than 60 fact-checking organisations in more than 50 languages. On the basis of what was being presented as the truth by the health authorities at the time, fact-checkers reviewed posts that appeared "suspicious" and flagged them as misinformation or removed them from the platform. The removal included, in Facebook's explanation, "harmful claims", including the really dangerous ones – suggestions to drink bleach to fight the virus – as well as controversial claims, such as seeing social distancing ineffective in limiting the spread of the virus.
In December 2020, Facebook banned posts questioning the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines. In February 2021, after "following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization", the point was amended further – you could not any more post claims that:
COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
At the end of May 2021, Facebook re-allowed posts about Covid-19 being possibly of anthropogenic origin, i.e. leaked from a laboratory.
Millions of removed posts
Perhaps all in all, in the case of Covid, a fairly wide range of topics went under the heading of "misinformation", and the decision to flag or remove them was taken not only by the platform's partner fact-checkers, but by the officials involved. All this led to a seemingly absurd censorship. For example, when journalist John Tierny wrote in April 2021 about the damage to children's mental and physical health caused by school closures and the imposition of masks – including the scientifically proven damage the author was referring to – Facebook tagged the article as "Partly False Information". The protest was ignored by the platform.
In August 2021, Zuckerberg said Facebook had removed 18 million posts that contained "Covid misinformation".
Factual information about Covid-19 and the pandemic is not, of course, the only thing that social media companies have prevented from spreading. In October 2020, the same happened with a New York Post article based on emails and documents found on President Biden's son Hunter Biden's laptop, linking the then presidential candidate Joe Biden to influence peddling towards Ukraine and China. At the time, the whole story was declared a Russian disinformation operation, but other publications have since acknowledged the veracity of the information. The so-called Twitter files revealed that the security authorities had been pre-processing social media companies for a long time, informing them that a "hack and leak operation" by a foreign country on Hunter Biden was about to take place and advising them to limit its spread. Twitter did not even allow a link to the article to be posted. Facebook did, but similarly restricted its distribution. Zuckerberg later admitted on Joe Rogan's show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had come to them to proactively inform them about the Hunter Biden laptop story. We have written about the Twitter files and the Hunter Biden laptop story on our page here.
From our own experience
However, as far as Facebook's Covid-19 rules are concerned, despite Zuckerberg's admission that they have implemented strong censorship based on false facts, they still apply. Any questioning of vaccines is still considered a violation on the platform.
Freedom Research has also been a target of Facebook “misinformation” rules when we posted our video “What Were the Biggest Lies of the Covid Pandemic?" on the platform. Shortly after uploading the video, we were notified that the post was in violation of Facebook's Covid-19 community rules, and that making such posts could result in our page being removed from the platform. Exactly what was wrong with the content of the video was not spelled out in the notice. In the video, the four scientists we interviewed answered the question: what do they think was the biggest lie people were told during the pandemic? The Facebook fact-checkers were probably most disturbed by the answer of molecular biologist Dr Jonathan Gilthorpe, who said outright that the claim that coronavirus vaccines are "safe and effective" was false. Although Facebook does not (yet) consider this to be true information, this particular claim, as well as others made in the video, are based on facts and research.
On the subject of censorship in the world, which has expanded in recent years, we have published an in-depth two-part analysis on our portal, entitled "How Censorship Has Exploded in Recent Years": Part 1 and Part 2.