Facebook and Its Fact Checkers Spread Misinformation | City Journal
"At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out, and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events. But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?
One reason is that a new breed of censors has been stifling scientific debate about masks on social media platforms. When Scott Atlas, a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, questioned the efficacy of masks last year, Twitter removed his tweet. When eminent scientists from Stanford and Harvard recently told Florida governor Ron DeSantis that children should not be forced to wear masks, YouTube removed their video discussion from its platform. These acts of censorship were widely denounced, but the social media science police remain undeterred, as I discovered when I recently wrote about the harms to children from wearing masks.
Facebook promptly slapped a label on the article: “Partly False Information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.” City Journal appealed the ruling, a process that turned out to be both futile and revealing. Facebook refused to remove the label, which still appears whenever the article is shared, but at least we got an inside look at the tactics that social media companies and progressive groups use to distort science and public policy.
The “independent fact-checkers” of my article are affiliated with a nonprofit group called Science Feedback, which has partnered with Facebook in what it calls a “fight against misinformation.” The group describes itself as “nonpartisan,” a claim that I would label “Mostly False” after studying dozens of its fact-checks enforcing progressive orthodoxy on climate change and public health. I didn’t see anything that would have displeased the journalists and officials promoting lockdowns and mask mandates. Nor did I see anything that would have displeased a Democrat, particularly during the last presidential campaign. In October, when Donald Trump was predicting that a vaccine was imminent, the group labeled that prediction “Inaccurate” and proclaimed that “widespread Covid-19 vaccination is not expected before mid-2021.” (Fact check: The vaccine rollout began in December.)
My article was flagged because it cited a study by a team of researchers in Germany who established an online registry for thousands of parents to report on the impact of masks on their children...
The study passed peer review at a medical journal, Monthly Pediatrics, but it didn’t satisfy Facebook’s fact-checkers. Science Feedback labeled the study “Unsupported”...
This is the same tactic used by the tobacco industry last century when epidemiologists observed high rates of lung cancer among people who reported a history of heavy smoking. The industry harped on the limitations of the studies—like their reliance on people’s self-reported history of smoking—and insisted that there was no proof that smoking caused cancer because no one had done a sufficiently rigorous controlled study.
Any study can be faulted for methodological shortcomings, but that doesn’t mean its results should be ignored or suppressed, particularly when the findings are consistent with a large body of evidence from other researchers. The mask problems reported by the German parents had been observed in dozens of previous experiments and observational studies, as another team of German researchers recently noted in a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
After reviewing 65 scientific papers—original studies, literature reviews, and meta-analyses—the researchers concluded there was statistically significant evidence of what they termed “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome.” This syndrome includes various physiological changes and subjective complaints: decrease in blood oxygen saturation; increase in blood carbon dioxide; increase in heart and respiratory rates; difficulty breathing; dizziness; headache; drowsiness; and decreased ability to concentrate and think. These risks were so well-known, the researchers noted, that many countries have occupational safety regulations limiting usage of masks. Germany, for instance, requires workers to take a half-hour break after wearing a cloth mask for two hours.
The fact-checkers at Science Feedback ignored all this evidence in reaching their conclusion that the German parents’ study was “unsupported and misleading.” Even worse, they themselves promoted a claim contradicted not only by the evidence but also by UNICEF and the World Health Organization, which recommend against masks for children aged five and under because of concerns about safety.
The fact-checkers summarized their critique of the German study in a highlighted box labeled “Key Take Away,” which began, “Masks are safe for children over the age of two years to wear, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.” This pediatric association, known for its advocacy of progressive causes (like allowing transgender youths to play in girls’ sports), had made that assertion on its website along with other questionable statements, like its advice to young athletes to wear a face mask during both training and competition. (Tell that to Maggie Williams and her coach.) Why was this group’s opinion the “Key Take Away” regarding the safety of masks? It was grossly irresponsible—worse than “unsupported and misleading”—for the fact-checkers to ignore the peer-reviewed scientific literature in favor of evidence-free statements from a professional association.
When City Journal appealed Facebook’s “Partly False” label on my article, we pointed out that that there was nothing false in either my article or the study of German parents... We also noted in our appeal to Facebook that the fact-checkers at Science Feedback had ignored scientific evidence in offering false reassurances about the safety of masks.
Facebook apparently made no effort to bring in a neutral arbiter for this appeal. It let Science Feedback be the final judge of its own fact-checking. We were notified by Science Feedback that its team had rejected our appeal, and the team’s justification was a blend of obfuscation and inaccuracies that would have been flagged by a competent editor or fact-checker...
The fact-checkers’ final justification for their decision was my description of a study analyzing the spread of Covid from schools during last spring’s outbreak in Sweden. It was done by economists at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala who had access to the medical records of the entire country’s population. They compared the parents of senior-high-school students, who switched to online instruction, against those with younger students who kept going to school and did not wear masks in the classroom. There was little difference in the rates of Covid infections and serious cases. These results jibed with other evidence that schoolchildren are not significant spreaders of the virus, and also with evidence that places without mask mandates have fared no worse than places with the mandates. One could hardly ask for a more rigorous and thorough study: a nationwide natural experiment involving hundreds of thousands of parents.
But it wasn’t good enough for the fact-checkers at Science Feedback...
It seems that the fact-checkers at Science Feedback believe that the unmasked schoolchildren were infecting large numbers of Swedish adults while miraculously leaving their own parents unscathed. And I’m the one guilty of “flawed reasoning”?
We gave up arguing with Facebook. The Science Feedback team never did identify an inaccurate fact in the article, but this exercise obviously wasn’t about accuracy. The fact-checkers were actually fact-blockers. Once it puts a warning label on a story, Facebook says that its News Feed algorithm “significantly reduces the number of people who see it,” and the platform can inflict further punishment by limiting distribution of other stories from that website and preventing it from advertising. The fact-blockers don’t even have to pretend to find an error. They can smear a journalist and blacklist a story by affixing a vague label like “Misleading” or “Missing Context.”
Veteran television journalist John Stossel, who has written about the egregious tactics
used to suppress his environmental reporting, says that Science
Feedback’s unwarranted labels have had a lasting effect on the size of
his audience at Facebook, costing him millions of viewers of his weekly
videos. The Wall Street Journal, responding to a spurious “Missing Context” label on an op-ed article about herd immunity, concluded that Science Feedback is engaging in “counter-opinion masquerading as fact checking.”
Facebook enjoys immunity from legal liability because it claims to be a tech platform for others’ content, not a journalistic enterprise, but it and Science Feedback are acting like a publisher. They endorse sweeping claims for the efficacy and necessity of mask mandates and lockdowns—no need to quibble about the methodological flaws of that evidence—while making up excuses to suppress contrary findings. Instead of encouraging debate about the harms and benefits of these policies, they work to conceal the harms and pretend there is no scientific debate about the benefits."
Of course, pro-mask studies with horribly shitty designs are loved by the "fact checkers".