https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/16/social-media-censorship-sows-the-wind-and-we-all-reap-the-whirlwind/
Google, Facebook, and Twitter wanted to make a happier world in which we weren’t troubled by wrong information or misleading ideas. Instead they have led America to the brink of genuine catastrophe.
My first encounter with social media fact-checking was over a year ago, when Facebook appended a “false information” tag to a meme I had posted about World War II, of all things. An article by PolitiFact, to which Facebook directed everyone who saw this meme, informed us that careful research had proved that gun control did not, in fact, help advance the Holocaust, and so it was not fair to use the Holocaust as an argument against gun control in America.
One problem with this article is the touchingly naïve idea that a complex question, over which historians continue to argue, could be stamped true or false as though it were a fact you’d simply been too lazy to look up.
A second problem is that this fact-checking article is full of factual errors. But that’s not surprising when such articles are generally written by a twentysomething journalism school graduate who became an “expert” in World War II that afternoon after her supervisor told her to research a meme on the Internet.
The biggest problem, however, was that Facebook had decided that this question—remote and unimportant as it might be in our daily lives—was not something you should be allowed to think about. If you thought about it yourself, unguided, as though you were, say, an adult and not a schoolchild, you might come to the wrong conclusion. And lest you be misled into thinking there was a connection between gun control and tyranny, Facebook had looked into the matter for you. And don’t worry, they found there wasn’t any connection, so you can rest easy and move on to the fluffy kitten pictures.
