While Facebook has been forced to reverse a major component of its Covid-related censorship – that pertaining to the possible origin of coronavirus – it continues to enforce other rules around what can and cannot be said about the pandemic.
On both Facebook and Instagram, the giant remains committed to playing the judge, jury, and executioner of content it doesn’t approve of that concerns vaccines, and now reports say that mentioning or posting screenshots of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails has also been declared off limits.
The emails, that surfaced thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests and were published by Buzzfeed and The Washington Post, show Fauci, who is considered America’s top authority on the virus and has been a staunch proponent of mask-wearing, stating at the start of the pandemic he didn’t really think masks provided effective protection.
Despite this being factual information, shedding light on it on Facebook, however, is still a taboo, as a number of Facebook users said on Twitter earlier in the week that they either got posts deleted or accounts suspended for commenting or discussing the emails, or simply posting screenshots of them. In addition, Facebook is going down the route of “fact-checking” this content and labeling it as “fake” for “missing context.”
The Federalist website said that an article that said Fauci was advocating for widespread mask-wearing despite the fact he thought it offered only limited benefit got fact-checked as false.
This verdict apparently came because the site didn’t also go to the trouble of excusing and justifying Fauci’s stance expressed in the emails by providing content that would say his change of hearts regarding masks came because of “new information emerging and concerns over the limited supply of masks for medical personnel subsiding.”
This fact-check was carried out by Agence France-Presse, one of the outfits that emerged in recent years as demand for third-party, “independent” fact-checking increased amid growing pressure on Big Tech to control the message on a number of issues, and step up censorship.
Instagram was also caught flagging posts, including memes, as fact-checked and found to be missing context this week – although it seems this was short lived because the labels apparently quickly disappeared.
