Facebook got it wrong. They’ve got it wrong on many other occasions and will get it wrong on many future occasions, of course, but this time is different — they’ve admitted they got it wrong.
The company recently backtracked on a longstanding policy of coronavirus-related censorship, saying it would no longer remove claims that the virus is man-made or lab manufactured.
As Breitbart News’s Simon Kent reported, this occurred on the same day that President Biden ordered intelligence agencies to increase efforts to discover the cause of the virus:
The policy change came on the same day President Joe Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” to investigate the origin of the virus, despite ending a State Department investigation under former President Donald Trump seeking the same goal, as Breitbart News reported.
Facebook released a memo detailing its new stance, pointing to “ongoing investigations” as reason for its change of heart while adding the proviso other restrictions remain.
Conservative media has also been investigating the “lab leak hypothesis,” the theory that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in a lab, and most likely spread as a result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology since the beginnings of the pandemic in 2020. The Trump administration investigated the possibility that the virus originated in a Chinese bioweapons lab, via a State Department investigation.
Yet the mainstream media, in collusion with the tech giants, did everything it could to close off this line of inquiry. In January 2020, at the very start of the outbreak, Twitter blacklisted an entire news organization, ZeroHedge, for investigating links between the Wuhan Institute and the virus (the ban, which Twitter initially said was permanent, was later reversed).
Only now, after approval from the Biden administration, is Big Tech backtracking.
But what about all the people who were censored? What about all the people who were banned? Is Facebook going to apologize to them? Is it going to reinstate the banned accounts?
Probably not, because one of the new rules of Silicon Valley appears to be: you aren’t allowed to be right before the media and Democrats are. You have to wait for them to catch up — and only then can you discuss the likely truth without the risk of censorship.
We can only imagine how many other “conspiracy theories” and items of “misinformation” that Facebook will, in time, realize are actually true.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
