When the BMJ published an extraordinary article documenting the censorship of one of its articles by Facebook, it lifted the curtain on a clandestine practice performed thousands of times a day. According to the medical journal, a peer-reviewed piece documenting an investigation into clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia, a contracted company which assisted with the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, was labelled as “partly false” and suppressed on the network.
Despite being fully evidenced and error-free, Lead Stories, a company that conducts around half of all fact-checking on Facebook, said the article was “missing context” and stated that a whistle-blower at the heart of the investigation failed to “express unreserved support for covid vaccines”. The fact-checking company later commented that it was concerned about who was sharing the article online. In other words, the documentation of research and investigation in some areas is not permitted if it risks causing the infantilised public to stray from their designated path.
What competency Silicon Valley executives or their fact-checking subsidiaries have to make judgements on the accuracy of information published by the UK’s premier medical journal is hard to see, but it speaks to a wider paranoia about the spread of wrongthink online. The concept of correcting falsehoods with counter-speech is not a problem in and of itself. The problem is that this practice is often not what it says on the tin. This became evident in 2021, when award-winning investigative journalist Ian Birrell’s UnHerd article on the origins of Covid and the developing questions around a potential lab leak was “fact-checked” and flagged on Facebook as “false information”. Facebook later reversed its policy position on preventing discussion of the lab leak theory only after the White House accepted it as a possible line of inquiry.
Under the weight of political pressure to shut down online discourse, “fact-checking” is becoming a major Silicon Valley funded institution unto itself. Increasingly, fact-checking constitutes tech companies and their subsidiaries casting editorial judgements on information presented into the public domain; judgements which represent a sanctioned version of the truth. Often, it is also coupled with attempts to suppress the spread of the information in question as well as openly discredit it.
This is straightforward censorship and speaks to a broader feature of society in liberal democracies in 2022, where a moral panic about the accuracy of expression has created a censorship crisis. The foundation of this concern is not ill-founded, but the growing fear around false information repackaged as “disinformation” focuses not on the powerful, but often on the spread of ideas and information amongst ordinary people. If even the BMJ can be censored for medical “misinformation” then what hope is there for the rest of us?
“Fact checkers” are just a fig leaf. It’s censorship pure & simple. Anything which counters a (current) government “line” can now be flagged as misinformation. It’s quite clear that Big Tech companies like Facebook & Google are working hand in glove with governments. The German government is apparently now considering banning the Telegram messenger app (they want it removed entirely from app stores) because “unlike Facebook & WhatsApp, Telegram does not cooperate”: i.e. they permit users to exchange information which does not always dovetail with government policy.
For Big Tech companies which play ball the advantages are obvious: they can retain their monopoly market position by “legally” killing off competitors at the flick of a switch. The banning of Parler at the beginning of 2021 is a prime example: Parler’s user base was growing at a rate of 1 million users per day in the days leading up to the plug being pulled on them by being removed from the Android and Apple app stores. Telegram, with close to 500 million users, is currently WhatsApp’s most direct competitor. So rest assured Facebook (WhatsApp’s owner) will be egging the German government on at every step. After that, the censorship can be expanded to other countries.
It also makes good business sense for Google (Android) & Apple(IOS) to remove popular apps which governments consider “non-compliant” from their app stores. These 2 companies control the mobile market so completely that they will always get any mobile traffic going. But more importantly, by cooperating with the censorship demands of the authorities, they stay on the “right” side of government and a blind eye is often turned to their other nefarious activities in dominating and profiting from the digital world we now are all forced to live in. Welcome to the new normal.
They need to admit fact checking is Editorializing, and so admit they are publishers, as they so obviously are.
Read today’s Daily Mail – that MAN on the American University Woman’s swimming team is allowed to be nude (he has his genitalia intact, and likes women sexually) in the Woman’s changing room as they change and shower – and they must tolerate this or they could lose their athletic scholarships to University, and their place on a top swimming team
Women forced into nudity with a man – it is getting past weird, and is now a pathological degeneracy. Then all the stories of Soros funded DAs and Prosecutors freeing all criminals and allowing all manner of crime till society is becoming destroyed…..
And then Social media is censoring any protests against the degeneracy and the intentional destruction of Western Culture and society, and pushing to the fore and thing promoting such thinking and action.
Dominic Sandbrook

Thomas Fazi and Toby Green

Ella Whelan

Andrew Gold

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