Facebook is lifting a ban on posts that suggest COVID-19 was manmade. Facebook put that ban in place after consulting with the World Health Organization on February 8. The WHO came to the conclusion that the virus couldn’t have possibly been manmade after a joint investigation with China. Of course, given that the World Health Organization has long been criticized for catering to China, which has been extremely uncooperative when it comes to looking into the origins of the virus, it’s hard to understand why that would have convinced anyone in the first place.
When you couple that with the fact that scientists put out a letter in April claiming Who worked with China to cover up the origin of the virus, Facebook’s ban makes even less sense. The same goes for Facebook’s decision to remove the ban yesterday. Did anything change with WHO or China? No, not really. What did change is that the Patron Saint of COVID doctors, Anthony Fauci arbitrarily decided after months of saying exactly the opposite, that yes, maybe the infection did come from a Chinese lab.
Did the infection actually come from a Chinese lab? It’s certainly possible to get a definitive answer to that question, but to do so would probably require the cooperation of the Chinese government. Since that’s not forthcoming, we may never know if this was a manmade virus unless say a scientist defects or the CIA manages to overhear some conversations. That has been the case since the beginning and it was as just as true when Facebook put a ban on those posts as it is today.
That is the big problem with the whole idea that social media services should be “fact-checking” posts. They’re not qualified to do it in the first place and even if they were, they have their own ideological agendas that warp everything they do. Does that mean their fact checks are always wrong? No. Some of them are spot on. However, many others are arbitrary or wrong and because of the fact that all these social media companies are run by far-left-wingers, their frequent mistakes and bad faith decisions inevitably end up mostly impacting conservatives while liberals are given a free pass. If AOC and Nancy Pelosi had been pushing the idea that the virus came from a Chinese lab, while conservatives doubted it, those posts would have never been banned in the first place. So, in the end, what’s a fact check worth from a company like Facebook? Not much at all.
John Hawkins is the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know. You can find him on Parler here and on Twitter here.
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