The Wall Street Journal reports today that in 2021 Facebook removed posts saying COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak. This was done due to "pressure" from "the administration and others."
There's no indication of what that pressure entailed, but in a similar case involving vaccine hesitancy it appears to have been public comments from Joe Biden:
Administration officials had come to believe that many Americans were hesitant to get vaccines because of false information they saw on Facebook. “They’re killing people,” President Biden said that July.
....Following the president’s “killing people” comment, the Facebook vice president [Nick Clegg] circulated a memo assessing the difference between Facebook’s content policies and the Biden administration’s demands—some of which the company appeared ready to push back on.
“There is likely a significant gap between what the WH would like us to remove and what we are comfortable removing,” the Facebook vice president said.
....At the same time, Facebook officials appeared to feel pressure to address the White House’s concerns....“Given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Administration—data flows etc—that doesn’t seem a great place for us to be, so grateful for any further creative thinking on how we can be responsive to their concerns,” he said.
As "pressure" goes, this is pretty small beer. As "censorship" it's laughable. Facebook was being criticized all over the place for allowing users to post potentially dangerous disinformation about COVID, and it was common knowledge that the Surgeon General and others were pushing Facebook to be more aggressive. In the end, Facebook responded to some of the criticism but not all of it. The final decisions were clearly in their hands.
Note that this is all based on yet more leaks from a Republican committee in the House, so there's no telling what it leaves out. It's usually something from these guys. Caveat emptor.
I read somewhere that Critical Race Theory was, perhaps surprisingly, not polling well for the Rs, so they switched to trans stuff. But it seems this "we're being cancelled!" gets a lot of airtime from them, so I'm assuming it polls well. Which, as usual, is a sign of how non-rational these people are given that they have the WSJ, Fox News, not to mention that the electoral college (the biggest affirmative action program there ever was, surely) made Donald and his family the main attraction for 4 years. Just rewatched "The Apartment" the other day and there's a line that Billy Wilder and Izzy Diamond give to Shirley MacLaine toward the end, "Some people are takers, and some get took". Naive people like me who believe in personal restraint just need to admit the Rs are takers; they're going to keep saying they are victims in various ways, no matter what.
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I find the sub-head interesting. If indeed it was the bio-engineered variant of the lab-leak theory, that is patently false. There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is a result of bio-engineering and those posts should have been taken down.
The recent New York Post article on the new revelations! about the lab-leak hypothesis confused these two very different possible origin stories. I’ll go with ignorance and malice both — it’s the Post.
Even the evidence for the "weak" version of the lab-leak is pretty thin on the ground.
What do you mean by "bio-engineered"?
If you mean that a scientist designed the DNA sequence, you are correct.
However, there are other ways to engineer viruses. The simple is serial passage through human cell cultures. This is force driving evolution for infectiousness in humans.
As even The Atlantic agrees, this is a plausible origin story and the scientists writing the Proximal Origin paper originally did not dismiss it. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/07/covid-lab-leak-congress-investigation/674690/
When they did dismiss it, their reasons seem political:
In a Slack conversation, one of them referred to “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release.”
So Orange Jesus can scream and threaten people and businesses all the live long day for 4 years, and nobody complained they were under pressure from the administration? Utter bull shit.
Nick Clegg is a very disappointing person.
Possibly off-thread, but has anyone noticed that Kevin prominently credits the WSJ for this report (and often for WaPo stories) but rarely or never the NYT?
He'll quote passages like this from them. You can tell by hovering that he's linking to the Times, but few do that, so for most it's just a random link. Check it out next time you see an apparently-unattributed link here.
I presume that if the Times quoted from this blog with just a link, no named attribution, Kevin would justifiably feel ripped off, so why does he do this to them? What does he have against the Times?
Vaccines are pretty much one of the triumphant moments of science, and have saved millions of lives...the burden to put them in the spotlight is about as hard as waking up in the morning, let the fools crow, the passage of knowledge will not be superseded by superstition for any lasting period, the witch burnings and related stupidity lost a long time ago.
"Vaccines are pretty much one of the triumphant moments of science ... "
"At your highest moment … be careful. That’s when the DEVIL comes for you!" - Denzel Washington
The moment science becomes arrogant is the moment that it becomes closeminded is the moment it becomes pseudoscience.
Drum: "As "pressure" goes, this is pretty small beer. As "censorship" it's laughable. Facebook was being criticized all over the place for allowing users to post potentially dangerous disinformation about COVID,"
I remember when Drum started this blog he was actually a liberal.
And what "dangerous disinformation" was posted on Facebook?
Y'all will be shocked to learn that all sorts of right-wing websites blared 'BIDEN WHITE HOUSE ORDERED FACEBOOK TO CENSOR VACCINE MEMES AND TUCKER CARLSON POSTS'. Which even the first line of their story contradicted, but how many right-wingers read beyond the headline?