MSM Admits Fact Checkers Were Wrong — Truth Will Never Be Found Through Censorship

June 12, 2021

Don Via Jr., Guest
Waking Times

Over the last twelve months, social media’s expurgation of any and all information pertaining to Covid-19, not part-and-parcel to the mainstream status quo, has become ineffaceable.

Everywhere we look now, we see embedded links to the Covid-19 Information Center on any post that dares even utter the words “vaccine” or “covid”. More pervasive still, are the notices of “this content is no longer available”, having been unceremoniously expunged for allegedly violating the ministry of truth’s “community guidelines”. Being so brazen as to even brand one hundred percent authentic facts as “misinformation”.

Facebook is now permeated with warnings pinned upon post after post indicating “this information has been disputed by independent fact-checkers”.

Ahh yes, the same “independent fact-checkers” that only recently had their financial biases uncovered. Confirming the very conflicts of interest many of us had suspected in the first place, along with their counterparts in the mainstream media.

Ironically, just as a recent report has demonstrated how censorship backfires — Indicating excessive “fact-checking” actually contributed to the spread of misinformation.

Now, as the Overton window begins to shift it appears the MSM is left with egg on their face yet again.

On May 26th, as new research alleging the supposed origins of Covid-19 began to surface, Facebook announced that it would no longer be deleting posts claiming that the virus may have been man-made. What the company did not announce, of course, was recompense or at the very least an apology for all of the people whose free-speech it had infringed upon over the last year and a half.

On June 1st reports began to surface calling out the Washington Post for stealthily editing a 15 month old headline in which they had preemptively “debunked” the Wuhan lab origin theory of SARS-CoV-2.

Now, headlines, pundits, and politicians have done a complete one-eighty and are running amok propagating this as a part of the new mainstream narrative — with zero regard for the civil liberties they spent months trampling by vilifying those who postulated this plausibility.

A recent Bloomberg opinion piece lays out quite concisely the very argument that we and many others have carried for years — Transparency, as opposed to obscurity, is always the best course of action;

The author states at various points —

“Labelling misinformation online is doing more harm than good. The possibility that Covid-19 came from a lab accident is just the latest example. Social media companies tried to suppress any discussion of it for months. But why? There’s no strong evidence against it, and evidence for other theories is still inconclusive. Pathogens have escaped from labs many times, and people have died as a result.
Social media fact-checkers don’t have any special knowledge or ability to sort fact from misinformation. What they have is extraordinary power to shape what people believe. And stifling ideas can backfire if it leads people to believe there’s a “real story” that is being suppressed” …..
“It’s much better to provide additional information than to censor information” …..
“Even without the power of censorship, social media culture encourages the facile labelling of ideas and people as a way of dismissing them — it’s easy to call people deniers or as anti-science because they question prevailing wisdom.”

Concluding the piece by stating —

“The fiasco was the media’s propagation of the lie that the issue was settled and that anyone questioning it might be deemed an idiot or conspiracy theorist.”…
“What helped was not taking away information but giving people additional information. Censoring information — or what one deems “misinformation” — isn’t as helpful as it seems. The best we can do is keep questioning, and give people the most complete story we can.”

With these facts in mind, there are a few points important to note however. While this may in some ways come as a form of vindication for those that were previously silenced, it is necessary to recognize that this is not a confirmation of the lab origin theory. Nor should a narrative being adopted by the mainstream be seen as a form of validation or legitimacy. Rather, it is a demonstration of their blatant hypocrisy and stifling of discourse and objective critical analysis.

As always, the corporate media–intelligence–apparatus of the United States, who functions as a state disseminator of propaganda have been thoroughly documented in TFTP’s most recent investigative series installment — One should always question the motives of the media when they adopt a story, as almost always they possess an ulterior agenda.

Already, we see the neoliberal and neoconservative talking heads twisting this rhetoric to better fit their aims of demonizing their geopolitical opposition in China.

Fervent warmonger Senator Tom Cotton, who has championed the idea of the Wuhan lab leak against China from the very beginning; has been frothing at the mouth at this revitalized opportunity to capitalize upon these sentiments for his own nefarious incentives, as elaborated in a recent account by journalist and political commentator Caitlin Johnstone.

That’s not to say that if the virus did originate in the Chinese lab, if it were or wasn’t released deliberately, or any of the other yet to be confirmed uncertainties, that any crimes committed by the CCP regime should not be held to account. But the American government, in all of its imperialist machinations and blatant hypocrisies are the last ones that should be doling out recompense to that regard.

In any case, as Miss Johnstone explains, it is because of the US’s imperialist influence over the international community that any truly unbiased and independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19 is likely impossible. And this is largely due to the increasing tempo with which the US State Department is ramping up its new Cold War propaganda against its geopolitical adversaries in the east.

Despite these points, it is evident in this latest flip-flop fiasco that one thing is certain. Suppressing genuinely open public dialogue with regard to this or any other prevailing issue is not only an affront to the right of free speech. It is an affront to intelligence itself.

It should be held among the most basic of principles that for any society to be intellectually competent, and therefore be aptly informed and capable of rendering the most logical decisions; encouraging communication and free expression of ideas throughout the public sector is of the utmost preeminence.

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