The entire establishment came down hard on the story, calling it “misinformation.” Former intelligence officials claimed it was Russian misinformation, the FBI warned Facebook off the story, and social media companies suppressed it. Twitter booted the Post off its site because the paper refused to retract the story.

Twitter did spread misinformation like this, though:

It wasn’t until months after the election that the rest of the MSM quietly confirmed that everything in the story was actually true. The New York Post wrote an appropriately scathing editorial blasting the New York Times for its shoddy reporting:

Forgive the profanity, but you have got to be s–tting us.

First, the New York Times decides more than a year later that Hunter Biden’s business woes are worthy of a story. Then, deep in the piece, in passing, it notes that Hunter’s laptop is legitimate.

“People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity,” the Times writes. “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

Authenticated!!! You don’t say. You mean, when a newspaper actually does reporting on a topic and doesn’t just try to whitewash coverage for Joe Biden, it discovers it’s actually true?

This was one of the most blatant examples of misinformation that changed the course of an election in US history. And it was perpetrated by the social media companies in cahoots with the rest of the establishment.

But Facebook’s suppression of medical information is equally troubling, and Dr. John Campbell, a former nursing teacher in Great Britain whose YouTube channel was widely praised by the medical establishment at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, has produced a video attacking Facebook’s sloppy (and worse) practices suppressing medical information and debate during the pandemic. He uses an insufficiently famous case from last year where Facebook relied on a sketchy “fact checker” to suppress a study from the British Medical Journal that questioned the reliability of studies done on the COVID vaccine.

The video is great, if a bit long, and well worth a watch:

The substance of the video is an examination of Facebook’s reliance on ridiculously incompetent and politically motivated “fact checkers” to suppress information that contradicts the Narrative™.

The BMJ, as you probably know, is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world. It isn’t the province of cranks, and their story on the poor testing practices behind the vaccine are actually undisputed, if a bit buried under the weight of BS from the establishment. All this was revealed last year.

The BMJ shot back, in a shocking attack on Facebook. It is not at all usual for a staid medical journal to blast anybody, but they let Facebook have it right between the eyes. I quote the letter in full below:

Open letter from The BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

We are Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of The BMJ, one of the world’s oldest and most influential general medical journals. We are writing to raise serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party providers on behalf of Facebook/Meta.

In September, a former employee of Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, began providing The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.

The BMJ commissioned an investigative reporter to write up the story for our journal. The article was published on 2 November, following legal review, external peer review and subject to The BMJ’s usual high level editorial oversight and review.[1]

But from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context … Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”

Readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.[2]

We find the “fact check” performed by Lead Stories to be inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.

— It fails to provide any assertions of fact that The BMJ article got wrong

— It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials”

— The first paragraph inaccurately labels The BMJ a “news blog”

— It contains a screenshot of our article with a stamp over it stating “Flaws Reviewed,” despite the Lead Stories article not identifying anything false or untrue in The BMJ article

— It published the story on its website under a URL that contains the phrase “hoax-alert”

We have contacted Lead Stories, but they refuse to change anything about their article or actions that have led to Facebook flagging our article.

We have also contacted Facebook directly, requesting immediate removal of the “fact checking” label and any link to the Lead Stories article, thereby allowing our readers to freely share the article on your platform.

There is also a wider concern that we wish to raise. We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime. To give one other example, we would highlight the treatment by Instagram (also owned by Meta) of Cochrane, the international provider of high quality systematic reviews of the medical evidence.[3] Rather than investing a proportion of Meta’s substantial profits to help ensure the accuracy of medical information shared through social media, you have apparently delegated responsibility to people incompetent in carrying out this crucial task. Fact checking has been a staple of good journalism for decades. What has happened in this instance should be of concern to anyone who values and relies on sources such as The BMJ.

We hope you will act swiftly: specifically to correct the error relating to The BMJ’s article and to review the processes that led to the error; and generally to reconsider your investment in and approach to fact checking overall.

Best wishes,

Fiona Godlee, editor in chief
Kamran Abbasi, incoming editor in chief
The BMJ

The British Medical Journal was subject to a “hoax alert” for reporting true information. This sort of thing is par for the course, unfortunately.

Campbell himself has been the recipient of smears related to his own discussions of issues surrounding COVID. At the beginning of the pandemic he was widely praised for his coverage of the pandemic; in fact, he was among the first to sound the alarm as the pandemic got going. But as soon as he started saying unconventional things he too was widely attacked for spreading misinformation. Wikipedia’s description of him captures this dichotomy perfectly:

John Lorimer Campbell^[2] is a British YouTuber and retired nurse educator who has posted YouTube videos commenting on the COVID-19 pandemic since January 2020 on his channel, Dr. John Campbell. Initially, his videos received some praise, but later they veered into containing misinformation, such as the suggestion that deaths from COVID-19 have been over-counted, repeated false claims about the use of the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment,^[3][4] and misleading commentary about vaccine safety.^[5][6][7] By January 2022, his videos had been viewed more than 429 million times.

Particularly revealing is how they discuss his COVID-19 reporting:

In August 2020, UNICEF‘s regional office for Europe and Central Asia cited Campbell’s YouTube channel as an excellent example of how experts might engage with social media to combat misinformation,^[16] citing a March 2020 briefing by Social Science in Action.^[17] In an October 2020 interview on DW, Campbell is introduced as “an independent health analyst and one of the UK’s on-line authorities on this pandemic.”^[18]

Campbell began posting YouTube videos about COVID-19 daily in January 2020. In March 2020, he argued that China’s COVID-19 statistics were grossly underestimated and that the US and UK were doing too little to contain COVID-19.^[9] In September 2020, Campbell argued that more ventilation in pubs, restaurants and cafes was needed in addition to the existing mitigations.^[19]

In August 2022 David Gorski wrote for Science-Based Medicine that while at the beginning of the pandemic Campbell had “seemed semi-reasonable”, he later became a “total COVID-19 crank“.^[3]

So Campbell went from being “an excellent example of how experts might engage with social media to combat misinformation” to a “total COVID-19 crank.” Campbell didn’t change his approach. He just went where he believed the evidence led him. He didn’t attack other scientists, but when he disagreed with them based upon his own review of the evidence he said so. Horrors!

One example of “misinformation” he is vilified for is noting the relationship between the COVID-19 vaccine and heart problems. The possibility–even likelihood–of this relationship isn’t disputed, but because he emphasized it early on he is a “crank.” Just as the British Medical Journal was spreading “misinformation” for reporting on inconvenient facts.

This is how the misinformation game is really played–and the misinformation I am speaking of is that spread by the Establishment against anything they disapprove of. Facebook Twitter, Instagram, and just about every mainstream media outlet engages in precisely this sort of misinformation routinely, and it is corrupting both science and society. Our politics are distorted by it, medical practice is being destroyed by it, our society and our economy have been devastated by it, and our children have suffered irreparable damage from just this sort of misinformation.

I was speaking with a medical professional–an MD–about the COVID-19 booster this week. I asked what (s)he thought (I won’t identify them for obvious reasons!) about getting it. (S)he had not gotten it themself (damn, I am using fake pronouns now!), and refused to either recommend or dissuade me from getting it. They just didn’t know who to trust, and complained that the whole medical establishment had gone so woke that information and recommendations were worthless.

I’ve gotten the flu vaccine recently, and pneumonia as well. I got the original vaccine and the first booster. I will not be getting more COVID-19 or other mRNA vaccines until safety is firmly established. The current batch of “experts” are too invested in the “success” of these vaccines to trust them on the matter.

Social media companies have become enforcers for the establishment because they now are the establishment. Their interests are not aligned with you because you are not their customer–you are their product whom they sell to advertisers. They depend upon government sufferance because they can be regulated at any time, so they back the government over you.

Unfortunately social media has also become indispensable for billions of people. It is how we acquire news, it is how we communicate, and increasingly where we do commerce. The pandemic accelerated this mightily.

In the early days of the Internet we were assured that the distributed communications model inherent to the network would assure the development of a techno-anarchism that would be unstoppable. Governments would lose the ability to control the flow of information and citizens would be more empowered than at any time in human history.

How wrong this turned out to be. The development of social media reversed the trend, and now we are racing toward a future dominated by social credit systems where your access to information, commerce, services, and even a job are determined by your willingness to bow down to the elite.

Instead of a utopia, a dystopia is on the horizon.

Unless we stop it–somehow–the future looks bleak for free thinkers.