The incredible, blind arrogance of the fact checking censors

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 t...