Facebook’s megalomaniacal arrogance seems to know no bounds. With its notorious “fact-checkers” (so-called), Facebook is declaring itself the final arbiter of truth.
Especially scientific truth.
A core tenet of science is freedom of inquiry. Scientists must be free to publish and, more importantly, to discuss what others publish. As Nobel Prize winner Professor Peter Doherty says, most of the really interesting scientific stuff happens during post-publication discussion.
Nuh-uh, says Facebook. There is only received truth. No heresy allowed.
Social media can’t be allowed to suppress scientific discourse, critics said after Facebook ‘fact-checkers’ flagged as ‘false’ an Oxford professor’s report citing a Danish study on the effectiveness of masks against Covid-19.
“[What] has happened to academic freedom and freedom of speech? There is nothing in this article that is ‘false,’” Carl Heneghan, the director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, said on Friday.
He posted a screenshot of Facebook flagging his article for the Spectator magazine as ‘False information’, citing “independent fact-checkers.”
As I’ve warned time and again, so-called “fact-checkers” are almost invariably little more than bias-enforcement machines. It’s not for nothing that one of my “Lushy’s Laws” is: Always assume that “fact-checkers” are trying to bullshit you.
Heneghan was discussing the long-delayed study on the effectiveness of facemasks, conducted in Denmark and finally published this week. One of the few randomized controlled trials on masks, it suggested that masks alone don’t work to stop the spread of Covid-19.
Monitoring 6,024 adult participants for a month, half of them issued with masks and instructions on how to use them, Danish scientists found 1.8 percent of mask-wearers got the virus, compared to 2.1 percent in the control group.
While mask enthusiasts have tried to use that tiny difference as proof that masks really do work, the fact is that a 0.4% difference is statistically insignificant, indistinguishable from random data “noise”.
The political establishment in the West, however – including Silicon Valley tech giants – basically considers this heresy, and has flagged the study as ‘false information’.
Health authorities like the American CDC recently updated their position, insisting masks are even more effective against coronavirus transmission than previously believed, protecting the wearer as well as others.
This is almost certainly untrue, as the Danish study unequivocally shows.
Heneghan found himself under attack by other scholars, such as Thomas Conti of Brazil, for citing a supposedly “severely underpowered” study that was badly designed and showed a null result, arguing that masks absolutely work.
This is nonsense. The study seems as well-designed as is possible and certainly far superior to the sort of observational studies beloved of the mask enthusiasts. Furthermore, if the study shows a null result, then that in no way imaginable shows that “masks absolutely work”. The null hypothesis is, in fact, that they do not. It’s up to the mask fanatics to prove that they work, not for anyone else to prove that they don’t.
Historian and lockdown critic Phil Magness, [responded] that the issue at hand is “social media platforms censoring stories about it because they don’t like the political implications.”
Dame Helena Morrissey, a Conservative member of the UK House of Lords, seconded the sentiment.
“This is a very dangerous direction of travel with respect to what science actually is; our freedom of expression, diversity of thought, and democratic norms, irrespective of what anyone thinks about Covid-19,” she tweeted in support of Heneghan.
This is the New Dark Age that we increasingly find ourselves in. “Truth” is handed down from the lofty heights of Silicon Valley and heretics will be ruthlessly dealt with.
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