Facebook has announced that Posts regarding COVID 19 as a man-made virus will no longer be removed from the site. This comes shortly after President Joe Biden ordered an investigation into the possibility of the virus originating from a Chinese lab.
In a statement to Politico a Facebook spokesperson said “In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.”
Facebook preemptively stopped the circulation of posts regarding the lab theory before any real investigations into the origins of COVID 19. Facebook could not legitimately dispute these claims with evidence but banned the posts anyway.
Dinesh D’Souza pointed out on Twitter, that Facebook has exposed itself as a purveyor of misinformation. “For many months, Facebook used to ban the claim that Covid-19 is man-made as ‘misinformation.’ Now they won’t ban that same claim, because they concede it’s not misinformation. Doesn’t it follow from these two facts that Facebook itself has been a purveyor of misinformation?” He said Wednesday
Facebook could have avoided public humiliation had they not censored the political speech of users in the first place. It’s unclear what this means for users who have already experienced Facebook’s wrath.
“The social media giant’s reversal comes as the lab leak theory is gaining steam, amplified by a recent report in The Wall Street Journal that said three workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019 with coronavirus-like systems,” The New York Post wrote
President Joe Biden has acknowledged that two legitimate theories exist. One is that the virus came about naturally from animals and eventually spread to humans, and the other is that it came from a Chinese lab.
