Appeared in the Spectator; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-i-fell-foul-of-youtubes-fact-checkers/
The day after Mark Zuckerberg said fact checkers “have destroyed more trust than they have created” I experienced why he has a point. I had done an interview with an evolutionary psychology podcaster, Paula Wright, about the origin of Covid. In it I said something that caused the entire interview to be banned from Youtube. Wright’s appeals were rejected and it remains banned. What had I said that was so offensive? Was it a lie, a conspiracy theory, a mistake, a defamation?
No, it was a statement of historical fact that has been confirmed and agreed by mainstream science including the World Health Organisation. Namely, that in 1977 a worldwide flu outbreak was almost certainly caused by a mistake at a Chinese flu vaccine laboratory that resulted in an inadequately inactivated live flu virus being given as a vaccine to military recruits.
This was the conclusion, in 2015, of an investigation into the episode by Dr Michelle Rozo and Dr Gigi Kwik Gronvall at the Center for Health Security in Baltimore, Maryland. Their result was confirmed by Dr C. M. Chu, a former director of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, who wrote in the WHO Bulletin: “The introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus is now thought to be the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus”.
The existence of this theory is – how shall I put it? – a fact. Yet Youtube’s fact checkers have decided that my citing this fact “violated community guidelines” and posed “a serious threat of egregious harm by spreading misinformation about currently administered vaccines”. Some ill-informed, probably underpaid, definitely over-confident youth, working in Youtube’s dungeons, took one look at my remark and banned it based entirely on the arrogance of his or her own ignorance.
Contrast that with what happens on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. Readers who think something is factually wrong contribute a corrective note that other readers then vote on. A false accusation that something is false is soon exposed to ridicule. It is a bottom-up process that harnesses the wisdom of the crowd. There’s a word for that; oh yes, “democracy”. Friedrich Hayek pointed out decades ago that most information is distributed among people in society, not held in the head of one elite expert.
The paid fact-checking profession instead is based on the myth of the omniscient elite, the conceit that they don’t themselves need fact checking and a belief that hoi polloi cannot be trusted with the truth. There’s a word for that too; oh yes, “censorship”. As Paul Embery put it this week, to most politicians “disinformation and misinformation matter only when they are spread by their political opponents or the lower orders”.
https://www.paulembery.com/p/are-conspiracy-theories-far-right
The fact-checking industry expanded after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, motivated by a determination among journalists to ensure that the public never fell for lies. From the start it was contaminated by political bias. I recall a conversation with a New York based editor in 2016 who told me that the time had come for the media to stop informing the public and start telling them what to think instead. She expected me to agree. Most “moderators” and fact checkers are blatantly biased in both what they choose to fact-check and the conclusions they reach.
BBC Verify, for example, with 63 staff and a budget of over £3 million, not only far prefers hunting down right-wing myths to left-wing ones but makes so many mistakes that around 5% of its own stories already carry corrections. During last summer’s riots, for instance, it ran a story about a car full of Asian men having been attacked by white men, later posting, shame-facedly: “An earlier version of this article identified the men in the car as of Asian heritage. Humberside Police has since told the BBC they are Eastern European.”
https://unherd.com/2024/12/who-verifies-bbc-verify-2/
Back in the old days, before the internet, pre-publication fact checkers especially on American magazines were notoriously pedantic. One called Eric drove me up the wall for several weeks in the 1990s with petty inquiries about trivia in a single article: “You say the sun rose in the east that day,” he (almost) said one day: “how do you know that?” But at least they checked facts rather than just imposed dogmas. (The Spectator’s fact checkers are excellent and have saved me from several errors over the years.) I fear that the corruption of the fact-checking industry into a censorship industry has now discredited the whole idea of fact checking, which is a lethally dangerous thing to have done.
For more than a year during the pandemic Facebook refused to allow any user even to speculate about whether Covid leaked from a lab, relying on a debunking article by “Politifact”, which in turn relied on one flimsy paper that we now know was written by people who secretly believed the opposite of their own conclusions. Emails released by Congress reveal that Facebook responded cravenly to constant pressure from the Biden White House to censor critical posts, with Sir Nick Clegg telling colleagues at one point that Facebook should try to be “responsive…given the bigger fish we have to fry with the administration”. On another occasion Clegg tried to placate the angry White House after it demanded a video be banned by reassuring them that at least the video had received “50% demotion for seven days”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/08/27/how-zuckerberg-censored-covid-on-facebook/
I am pro vaccine but by far the quickest way to boost the anti-vaccine movement is to suppress true stories about vaccinations that went wrong. Youtube belongs to Google, which has yet to follow X and Meta into democratic fact checking. The tech investor Peter Thiel sees Mark Zuckerberg’s conversion to bottom-up fact checking as part of the old guard’s war on the internet – and the internet is winning. If you want to hear my interview uncensored, by the way, it’s on Paula Wright’s substack: https://www.paulawrightdysmemics.com/p/episode-7-matt-ridley-viral-the-search.
https://www.ft.com/content/a46cb128-1f74-4621-ab0b-242a76583105