Suppressing an argument
“The lie-detectors” (May 17th) discussed the work of “doughty fact-checking organisations” and mentioned that Facebook and Instagram “deleted 27m falsehoods about covid-19” during the pandemic. Among the “falsehoods” that these platforms deleted were posts claiming that covid-19 came from a laboratory, posts objecting to mask mandates and posts arguing that social distancing was ineffective. At the very least, these statements are now open to debate.
Fact-checking during the pandemic should provide a cautionary tale about censorship, rather than a model for future fact-checkers, doughty or otherwise, to follow.
Continue reading the entire piece on The Economist (paywall)
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
Photo by Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images
