Conservatives in the United States are no strangers to social-media censorship for their well-reasoned skepticism regarding the coronavirus.
But Wuhan virus truth-seekers worldwide have also been targeted by the millions—105 million to be exact.
According to Facebook’s new quarterly report, the global social media giant admitted to removing 7 million posts about the Wuhan virus between April and June 2020 for containing what it deemed “harmful” misinformation.
Facebook, which also owns Instagram, further slapped restrictive warning labels on 98 million posts across both social-media platforms during the second fiscal quarter this year for alleged “misleading” coronavirus information.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously said that the company’s heavy-handed warning labels effectively remove targeted posts because users abstain from clicking on them “95 percent of the time.”
The quarterly report comes after the high-profile banning of a viral video last month that showed a group of medical doctors on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court touting the benefits of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus.
The doctors also insisted that “we don’t need to be locked down” to prevent it from spreading. The video had 14 million views before it was taken down.
Other censorship examples appear purely political — to say nothing of the tens of millions of everyday people who share coronavirus-related thoughts and information.
Instagram threatened to delete Donald Trump Jr.’s account for spreading “misinformation” about the virus and hydroxychloroquine. However, Trump Jr. had only shared screenshots of CNN articles that contradicted each other on the issue.
An April 11 headline read, “President Trump is wrong in so many ways about hydroxychloroquine studies. Here are the facts.” A July 2 headline read, “Study finds hydroxychloroquine helped coronavirus patients survive better.”
“These are actual headlines from CNN,” Trump Jr. wrote after the posts were taken down, adding, “but because it doesn’t fit the narrative the social media masters are going to make sure that no one actually hears the truth.”
Zuckerberg, along with leaders from Apple, Amazon, Google, Youtube and Twitter, recently told the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee that he would personally ensure that posts expressing “harmful” or “misleading” coronavirus information would be censored.
Then, in Orwellian fashion, he said, “We do not want to become the arbiters of truth. I think that would be a bad position for us to be in and not what we should be doing.”
