Facebook’s Dangerously Fake “Fact Checking”

I’ve been drawing attention to the increasingly aggressive efforts by political and corporate interests to control the information you get on the new and online. I have often spoken of disingenuous “fact checking” efforts conducted by conflicted third parties who are actually trying to shape public opinion and control the information the public can access.

One chilling example comes in the form of Facebook’s fake “science fact checks.” The social media company has improperly been censoring and flagging material as “false.”

A recent example is a popular documentary by Epoch Times about the possible link between Covid-19 and a research lab in Wuhan, China.

The documentary formed no conclusions and the theories it discussed had not been disproven.

However, Facebook intervened to punish me and others who dared to share this factually accurate documentary on Facebook. Without warning, the social media company notified us that our pages were being throttled or shown to fewer people because we had shared an unspecified link. Facebook also said that people visiting our pages would be told we share fake news.

In trying to find out what the problematic link was, it led to the Epoch Times documentary.

But one glaring problem with the Facebook fact check was obvious. It flagged as “false” a conclusion that was never made in the documentary: that the virus “was the result of human engineering.”

So who connected to Facebook would want to stop people from seeing the documentary, by using a false pretense?

Facebook offers no place for users to challenge Facebook’s false science fact checks. But clicking the additional information on this particular fact check led to an unsigned article at a website called “healthfeedback.org.”

Three more significant problems quickly become apparent.

First, the article did not fact check the Epoch Times documentary that it supposedly debunked. The article was written before the documentary was published.

Second, nothing in the fact check says claims that the article examined were “false.”

Third, the article and its chief “reviewer” listed at the bottom, Danielle Anderson, try to convince readers that coronavirus could not have possibly come from the Wuhan lab– and that the thought that the virus is not of “natural origin” is a “conspiracy theory” that should not be considered or expressed– but Anderson is a U.S. scientist who says she works at the lab.

Meantime, the U.S. government confirmed it is investigating the possibility that the virus came from the Wuhan lab, despite the fake Facebook fact check that attempts to quell any such discussion.

When self-appointed fact-checkers intervene to try to stop people from accessing certain information, or to bully and controversialize those who report and read facts that are off the narrative powerful interests are trying to forward, it should be concerning to all.

It should make you wonder: who wants us to think this, why do they not want us to hear the information and think for ourselves– and why?

via Sharyl Attkisson