By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-01-13 01:54:27 | Updated at 2025-01-13 05:13:13
4 hours ago
Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end third-party fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram has a lot of people losing their minds, and not just in the fact-checking industry.
Generally, though, it’s the folks who benefitted from the industry — the ones who gained from having the “wrong” views suppressed.
President Biden gave the game away by calling the Meta CEO’s move “really shameful” because it means “millions of people reading, going online, reading this stuff.”
The real issue, that is, isn’t the checking, it’s the silencing.
Including by “experts” who have their own skin in the game.
Like the expert Facebook relied upon to censor our February 2020 opinion column that raised the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese lab where it had been created: It turned out she had her own reasons to protect the Wuhan Institute of Virology from suspicion.
Yet it still took us months to get Facebook to back off.
And this was part of what The Washington Post paints as “the golden age of fact-checking.”
“Our proudest year was 2020, when fact-checkers across the U.S. did some work that really meant the difference between life and death,” Alan Duke of fact-checking outfit Lead Stories told the WaPo. “We felt we were saving lives.”
Felt, but an actual fact-check says otherwise, because what social-media (and other media) censorship did in 2020 and 2021 was shut down debate over the best way to respond to COVID — leaving much of America responding the wrong way.
Most notably, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and his colleagues from Harvard and Oxford got silenced for recommending against mass lockdowns and instead for a focus on protecting only the elderly and other highly vulnerable populations.
It took years before Anthony Fauci admitted his crew simply made up the whole “six feet of social distancing” rule — and in the meantime millions of kids got kept out of school pointlessly for up to two years.
Not to mention all the folks who lost their jobs, the vast economic impact and so on.
Yes, the internet is packed with lies, misrepresentations and half-truths: So is all human conversation.
The only practical answer to false speech is and always been true speech; it doesn’t stop the liars or protect all the suckers, but most people figure it out well enough.
Shutting down debate in the name of “countering disinformation” only serves the liars with power or prestige or at least the right connections.
Heck, it can reward actual disinformation efforts: Back in 2020 (the golden age of fact-checking, remember), it made a huge success of the Biden campaign’s disinfo operation against our reporting off of Hunter Biden’ laptop.
They got 51 “experts” to imply The Post might have fallen for a Russian ploy, and most of the media (including the main social-media platforms) fell in line.
Alan Duke and all the other fact-check insiders arrogantly imagine they’ve been protecting us all, when as often as not they’re protecting lies against the truth.
PolitiFact and all the rest are welcome to keep going, as long as they’re just equal voices in the conversation; we certainly mean to go on calling out what we see as lies.
Check all the facts you want, as long as you don’t get to silence anyone else.
