Facebook and Twitter quieted the early lab-leak adopters under the guise of ‘fact checking.’
In the early days of the pandemic, and even before COVID-19 qualified as a pandemic, the idea that the virus had escaped from a lab rather than emerged from nature was treated as a deranged conspiracy theory, and perhaps even a xenophobic one.
Some of that instinctive skepticism can be attributed to the novel-like storyline that the lab-leak theory made for. Some of it can be attributed to its conflation with the less-plausible “bioweapon” theory. And some of it can undoubtedly be attributed to a political reaction to Donald Trump and other Republicans’ embrace of it. It’s difficult to parse how much, if any of it, can reasonably be chalked up to the capital-S Science.
Regardless of how much blame you assign to each of these for the initial maligning of the lab-leak theory, the reaction should cause a reconsideration of another art treated as Science: fact-checking. While partisan Democrats no doubt saw an opportunity to make political hay out of the seemingly outlandish theory, social-media companies also cracked down on those advancing it under the auspices of combatting misinformation.
Facebook was especially aggressive in this regard. Last spring, the company flagged as false and then banned a New York Post column by Steven Mosher making the case for the plausibility of the lab-leak theory. Mosher argued that the virus’s emergence in a city where gain-of-function research was being conducted on coronaviruses found in bats, the Chinese government’s reaction to it, and the historical record all suggested that its proliferation in people might very well be due to human error in a laboratory setting.
Even still, Mosher did not claim to be speaking authoritatively, stating only that it “may have leaked from a lab” and offering his opinion that this was the most likely scenario by which the pandemic had begun. According to Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari, Facebook cited an assistant professor who had worked with researchers in Wuhan as an authoritative source on why Mosher’s column was factually mistaken. In truth, though, the ruling reflected only a single professional opinion, not the facts, per se.
In September, Facebook also fact-checked an article from WION — an English-language Indian television channel and website — featuring quotes from Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese doctor who has alleged that the virus did escape from a lab in Wuhan. While some of Yan’s scientific work and explanations for her specific version of the theory have been widely criticized, that is not what ultimately earned the fact check. Instead, it was Yan’s claim that the Chinese government was silencing medical doctors about the virus that Facebook found objectionable.
It’s unclear why. It has been common knowledge since the very beginning that China has suppressed scientists who have tried to get information about the disease out to the rest of the world. Consider their treatment of Dr. Li Wenliang, who warned that the initial outbreak could have grave consequences and was subsequently “called in by both medical officials and the police, and forced to sign a statement denouncing his warning as an unfounded and illegal rumor,” per the New York Times.
Around the same time Facebook went after the WION article, Twitter suspended Yan’s account. Although Twitter does not comment on individual accounts, it seems safe to assume it did so under under its COVID-19 misinformation policy because of Yan’s high-profile advocacy for the lab-leak theory. At worst, Yan is wrong, but it would seem that she’s no more likely to be than those who signed on to similarly high-profile letters supposedly “debunking” her central thesis. It seems doubtful that their accounts face imminent suspension.
What these instances would seem to demonstrate is that the realm of fact-checking is not nearly as cut-and-dried as social-media companies such as Facebook and Twitter believe and that the process is subject to political and social pressures that corrupt them: Pressures that they are unable to stand up to.
In a media ecosystem where groupthink is already rampant, the enforcement of conformity by social-media giants would seem to only compound the problem.
Facebook did not return a request for comment.