Facebook Slaps Op-Ed as ‘False’ for Pointing to Wuhan Lab, Rolls Over When News of Censorship Explodes

On Feb. 23, Steven Mosher, president of the conservative Population Research Institute, had a commentary piece published in the New York Post regarding the origins of the novel coronavirus in China.

He wasn’t entirely convinced of the official origin story, infected bats being sold or eaten at a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Instead, in the piece, he argued that the origin of the virus might be from an accident or unauthorized leak from a laboratory in Wuhan.

As the Post noted in an editorial published Friday, “Mosher cited a host of suggestive facts, including urgent government directives, the sudden trip of China’s top biowar expert to Wuhan and that nation’s shoddy record of lab safety — as well as gaping holes in the wet-market explanation, such as the fact that the market in question doesn’t sell bats, the animal from which the bug supposedly jumped.”

This was fairly persuasive stuff, presented weeks before the rest of the media started covering it — and not just the conservative outlets, which we’ll get to in a bit. It was an opinion column, albeit one written by a persuasive individual who knew quite a bit about the subject. What could be wrong with that?

Plenty, at least to Facebook, which made sure the story’s distribution was cut way down.

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“The social media giant’s ‘fact-checkers’ decided this was not a valid opinion. If you tried to share Mosher’s column on Facebook, the social network stuck a ‘False Information’ alert on top, saying that finding was ‘checked by independent fact-checkers’ and preventing your friends from clicking to connect to the original article to see for themselves,” the Post editorial board wrote in Friday’s piece, describing what can only be called censorship by the social media giant.

“Again, this was an opinion column, not a news report,” the editorial continued.

“How, exactly, did Facebook determine that Mosher’s reasoned arguments constituted ‘False information’? Well, in fact, it didn’t so determine: Rather, it was an ‘independent fact-checker.’”

That independent fact-checker’s piece, rather unbelievably, used information from an individual who “had a clear conflict of interest: She has regularly worked with Wuhan’s researchers, and even done her own experiments there,” the Post wrote.

“Danielle E. Anderson, assistant professor, Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, personally attested to the lab’s ‘strict control and containment measures.’

“Anderson did admit, however, that Mosher was correct when he mentioned that SARS did twice escape a Beijing research lab in 2004,” the Post editorial added.

See if you can spot the problem in the evaluation of things by the second expert cited in the “fact-check” piece. This expert was disputing Mosher’s suggestion that the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology’s directive to labs to increase security measures amid the coronavirus outbreak might be evidence that the government knew sloppiness played a role in the outbreak’s origins.

“Any responsible government would strengthen safety and security procedures in high-containment labs that will and should be working with the novel coronavirus to develop countermeasures and diagnostics,” the expert told the fact-checker.

The Post was having none of that.

“Well, yes, any responsible government would,” the editorial board shot back.