On Tuesday, Twitchy posted a lengthy thread by Michael Shellenberger about how there was strong new evidence that COVID-19 had come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the scientists working on gain-of-function research were the first to become infected. It's not surprising at all to hear, but we remember the Washington Post publishing an article about Sen. Tom Cotton clinging to a "debunked" conspiracy theory that the coronavirus originated in a lab. (The Post went back and "adjusted" its fact-check of Cotton a year later.)
Shellenberger is back with a reminder that Facebook kept busy censoring the lab-leak theory.
In Feb. 2020, after a @nypost oped said COVID-19 came from a lab leak, Facebook censored the story. Why? Because "independent fact-checkers" said it was "False information." Not only was it true information, one of the fact-checkers had worked at the labhttps://t.co/7sPmKdpOYH
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 14, 2023
Ten months later, Facebook and Twitter censored @nypost for another accurate article, this time about Hunter Biden's laptop https://t.co/fdFpCiEl12
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 14, 2023
As such, the @nypost , which reporters @nytimes & @washingtonpost sneer at for being a "tabloid," got two of the biggest stories of 2020 right, while the Times and the Post — which called the lab leak a racist and "debunked conspiracy theory — got it horribly wrong.
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 14, 2023
Twitter & Facebook execs sided with media that confirmed their partisan assumptions rather than allow the debate to occur.
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 14, 2023
And Facebook continues its ideologically one-sided censorship today, censoring a reasonable debate over who blew up Nordsreamhttps://t.co/BplLOxZUT6
Facebook censored me in 2020 after I accurately said natural disasters were getting better, not worse, resulting in fewer deaths and causing less economic damage, when accounting for more wealth in harm's way, than they had in the past. https://t.co/Dd6EH3LX3T
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 14, 2023
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Here's the data showing declining disasters as a result of fewer deaths and declining costs from extreme weather events. This data is uncontroversial and uncontested. And yet Facebook continues to censor me for sharing this accurate information. pic.twitter.com/bO7Q4CFppE
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 14, 2023
Nearly 5M people on Twitter have seen, and nearly 7k have shared, our bombshell exclusive yesterday.
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 14, 2023
Just 5 people — 5, not 5M, nor 5k — shared our bombshell exclusive on Facebook.
Facebook operates blacklists and engages in partisan, ideological censorship pic.twitter.com/8b19VDPSAV
Interesting
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 14, 2023
The censorship industrial complex has been hard at work since 2016.
— Brandon (@HighlyRetired) June 14, 2023
"Fact checker" is the latest euphemism for "apparatchik".
— VonPhul (@BaronVonPhul) June 14, 2023
This is irreparable damage to Meta’s already questionable credibility.
— Potash Jenkins (@thepolishpen) June 14, 2023
Another so-called "conspiracy theory" turns out to have been true. Don't wait for any apologies. And don't wait for the legacy news to report on any of this.
— George Michael Sanders (@GeorgeM10912400) June 14, 2023
Thank goodness for Twitter 2.0, where you can freely post a thread like this one. And to think the press called it "racist" to suggest that the virus came from China, or even to call it the Wuhan virus (which they all did at first).
Just who did Facebook think they were protecting?
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