That Mark Zuckerberg is “getting rid of Facebook’s fact-checking department is ‘too little, too late,’ scoffs The Free Press’s Margi Conklin,” as quoted by the New York Post’s editorial board (January 8, 2025).
If things really change at Facebook, Conklin is wrong about that, although we can understand her bitterness. She says:
“Back in February 2020, when I was the Sunday editor of the New York Post, China expert Steven Mosher pitched” a story arguing COVID “likely leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
It took off online until Facebook fact-checkers “flagged the piece as ‘false information.’ ”
Danielle E. Anderson, “who advised Facebook to censor the piece,” had “a major conflict of interest” as she’d “regularly worked with researchers” at the Wuhan lab. “Legacy media outlets parrot[ed] the wet market theory, turning the idea of a lab leak into a ‘conspiracy theory.’ ”
“Seeing Big Tech censorship of the American media in real time…chilled me to my bones.”
In March 2024, Steven Mosher’s Population Research Institute reported that every fact that Mosher used in his Facebook-censored article “to point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of the China Coronavirus is true.”
Fact: China has a bioweapons program run out of two labs, the more advanced of which is the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Fact: Chinese agents have stolen dangerous coronaviruses out of North American labs and taken them to WIV.
Fact: Chinese virologists, working under the direction of the People’s Liberation Army, have genetically engineered at least one coronavirus to make it more infectious, reporting their “achievement” in the pages of the Journal of Virology.
Fact: Chinese biotechnology labs, such as the WIV, have a history of accidentally releasing dangerous pathogens into the surrounding population.
Fact: The Chinese coronavirus epidemic began in the city of Wuhan, the city where WIV is located.
The “fact-checkers” used by Facebook are a Leftwing advocacy group which falsely accused Mosher of “writing a clickbait headline without any previous experience in the medical field.” But Mosher actually has an advanced degree in the biological sciences and has published in medical journals. More importantly, he is one of America’s leading experts on China, is fluent in Chinese, and understands the crimes that the Communist Chinese Party has committed against its own people.
Suppose for the sake of argument that one or more of the details enlisted by Mosher or his interpretation of them had been mistaken. This, and the minor or major significance of any error, is the kind of thing that would be brought out in discussion.
PRI argued back then that Facebook’s discredited fact-checker should not again be used to fact-check anything for Facebook. The broader conclusion is also valid. Facebook should not use any fact-checkers to “fact-check” anything at all, ever, as a means of shutting down discussion. Let the persons participating in the discussion—including Facebook personnel, if they like—do the fact-checking and interpreting and arguing. But you can’t prove that the CCP does not act like itself by acting like the CCP yourself.
Margi Conklin applauds Zuckerberg “for admitting he was wrong and eradicating his fact-checking department. It’s not easy to deliver such a public mea culpa. But still, I wonder how much it will help. Once you’ve shut down a toxic waste dump that’s been poisoning a landfill for years, the ground is never the same.”
The question
This is too pessimistic if Zuckerberg’s conversion is real. The ground won’t stay poisoned if Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, is sincere. If he really does let account holders speak freely, they are the ones who will now determine what the ground is like. It will be like sedate or rambunctious, polite or vituperous free-for-all debate is always like.
But this is the question. Has Mark Zuckerberg realized the value of open discourse, and is he determined to uphold it as a matter of principle? Or is simply making a temporary and limited pragmatic accommodation?
