Facebook’s Fact-Checkers Changed the Way I See Tech—and Speech—Forever

 When I first heard that Mark Zuckerberg was shutting down Facebook’s fact-checking department, my first thought was: Too little, too late.

That’s because I’ve had my own experience with his team of fact-checkers.

Back in February 2020, when I was the Sunday editor of the New York Post, China expert Steven Mosher pitched me a theory about how the coronavirus started. Back then, it was believed it came from a wet market in Wuhan, but Steven was unconvinced. He said it was much more likely it had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had been doing experiments with the coronavirus for years.

This was before the lockdowns, and before Covid had spread across America and killed millions worldwide. Some experts had just started talking about the possibility of a global pandemic.

I was happy to publish Steven’s piece, because I figured the world would want to hear an alternative idea at an important moment from a social scientist who had lived in China and written books about the country.

I was right about the story. (In fact, the lab leak theory is now seen as the most likely explanation for Covid’s origins.) But I was wrong—and naive—to think anyone in power would want to hear it.

We published the piece on February 22, under the headline “Don’t Buy China’s Story: The Coronavirus May Have Leaked from a Lab.” It immediately went viral, its audience swelling for a few hours as readers liked and shared it over and over again.

I had a data tracker on my screen that showed our web traffic, and I could see the green line for my story surging up and up. Then suddenly, for no reason, the green line dropped like a stone. No one was reading or sharing the piece. It was as though it had never existed at all.

Seeing the story’s traffic plunge, I was stunned. I thought, How does that even happen? How does a story that thousands of people are reading and sharing suddenly just disappear?

Later, the Post’s digital editor gave me the answer: Facebook’s fact-checking team had flagged the piece as “false information.”

I was shocked—and embarrassed. Never in my life had a story I worked on been deemed “false information.” For a moment, I second-guessed myself. I was worried I’d done something wrong, and that I had caused reputational damage—and possible financial damage—to the Post. If your outlet gets dinged three times by Facebook, the digital editor told me, they pretty much censor all your stories from the platform. No media outlet could afford that.

In the meantime, I kept seeing stories by legacy media outlets parroting the wet market theory, turning the idea of a lab leak into a “conspiracy theory.” The message was clear: The Post was irresponsible for even suggesting such hogwash.

I feel ridiculous admitting it now, but even after more than 25 years as a journalist, even though I worked at a more irreverent newspaper, I strongly believed that our most prestigious outlets believed in seeking the truth. I trusted them. Now, I realized, they were pushing a singular narrative and squelching all other discussion. I was seeing Big Tech censorship of the American media in real time, and it chilled me to my bones.

What happened next was even more chilling. I found out that an “expert” who advised Facebook to censor the piece had a major conflict of interest. Professor Danielle E. Anderson had regularly worked with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and even done her own experiments at the institute—and she told Facebook’s fact-checkers that the lab had “strict control and containment measures.”

Well, of course she did.

Facebook’s “fact-checkers” took her at her word. An “expert” had spoken, Wuhan’s lab was deemed secure, and the Post’s story was squashed in the interest of public safety. Zuckerberg’s team wasn’t going to challenge the party line on the pandemic—especially after, as was reported last year, President Biden started pressuring Facebook to censor certain stories about Covid. It was strange to think the suppression of other stories like mine could have come straight from the White House.

Thankfully, the Post won the battle to have Facebook’s “false information” flag removed after a few months. But other outlets didn’t seem to care. In the years that followed, I watched as the elite media happily continued to dismiss the Post as a purveyor of false information on stories like Hunter Biden’s laptop and Joe Biden’s fitness to run the free world. Outlets like Politico, The Washington Post, and The New York Times sneered at the Post as a “far-right” tabloid with a political axe to grind, trying to convince their readers that nothing the paper reports is true.

But these outlets have been grinding their own axe, aided and abetted by Zuckerberg and other tech overlords who wish to decide what we all believe. In 2021, in the wake of a lawsuit, Facebook admitted that its “fact checks” are just “opinion,” used by social media companies to police what we watch and read.

I applaud 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.

Margi Conklin is the managing editor of The Free Press, overseeing the editorial team and our investigative reports, features, opinion pieces, and more. Previously, she held various senior roles at the New York Post, including editor of the Sunday edition, managing editor of news features, and features director. She has also worked as an editor at multiple national magazines in both the UK and the U.S., including Elle and Harper’s Bazaar.

https://www.thefp.com/p/facebook-fact-checkers-shut-down-my-story-on-covid-lab-leak-theory