HANNAFORD: Yes, we were fed a line on COVID

So yes, we were being gaslighted during the COVID-19 scare. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s August 26 revelations remove all doubt.Why, remains a matter of speculation; to attribute malicious intent to the US government and their junior partners-in-deception in Ottawa, would require further admissions from credible officials.But if you thought you were being censored during the COVID-19 scare, you were. We all were. As Zuckerberg related, even Facebook was invited to shut up and obey.As the Canadian mainstream media has yet to give Zuckerberg’s words the attention they merit, and those such as the CBC that have done so nevertheless downplay its significance, this may be the first you’ve heard of it.But this is huge.Thanks to Zuckerberg’s letter to the (US Congress) House Judiciary Committee, we now know that, “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our [i.e. Facebook] teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree."Even "humour and satire!" You know you're dealing with authoritarians when they not only can't take a joke, they silence the comedians.The House Judiciary Committee has pasted Zuckerberg’s letter on its Facebook page."I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it," Zuckerberg continues. "I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today.".Those choices would include not depending upon so-called "fact-checkers." Those words are themselves deceptive; they invite one to picture some genial old prodnose surrounded by dictionaries, encyclopaedias and computers, looking up scholarly material to see if "these things be truly so."Perhaps there are people like that at the Smithsonian.At Facebook, a more accurate stereotype would be a purple-haired kid right out of university, with a piece of shrapnel through the ear who, informed by her list of authorised talking points, assessed what was misinformation with the general guidance, "If in doubt, strike it out."The White House response (quoted in Barron’s magazine): “When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety. Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.”In other words, "yes exactly, but we thought we were doing the right thing."Here at the Western Standard, we had our own problems with Ottawa’s copycat, "you can’t say that" mentality. At the time, Facebook still distributed Canadian news and the COVID-19 challenge in this newsroom was to question the bromides from Ottawa and the provincial health services, without getting kicked off the platform. We did not always succeed.But we did our best to point out that: "Safe and effective" vaccines were not really vaccines in the way that your kid’s polio shot is a vaccineThe claims of people who felt terrible after getting jabbed should not be dismissed as statistically insignificantThere were too many incidences of healthy young people dropping dead not long after getting a shot and this to needed to be investigatedHundreds of thousands of vaccinated Canadians got COVID-19 anywayThe arbitrary actions of the Government of Canada in forcing vaccines upon people in federally regulated industries on pain of losing their jobs, was more about political messaging than a serious attempt to contain the spread of COVID-19That we knew from the start that the people at greatest risk of dying from COVID-19 were over 70 and suffering from multiple other serious health conditions. There was no reason to shut down the economy, then insist upon masks, social distancing and the closure of gymnasiums, restaurants and churches — according to the varied whims of provincial health authorities.Such was the Western Standard’s "seditious" message. Now, I feel like we should apologise to The Zuck for all the unkind things we muttered about him and his platform during that time. We had no idea what he was dealing with.Thanks to Zuckerberg’s letter, we also know that in the run up to the 2020 US presidential election, Facebook was played on the Hunter Biden laptop story; warned by the FBI that it was Russian disinformation, the information revealed in the laptop about the Biden family’s business dealings nevertheless turned out to be entirely genuine. This had a material effect upon voting intentions during that election.Bottom line: Thanks to Zuckerberg, we know that at the behest of the US Government, they censored Americans.They also censored Canadians, and to the degree that there was any difference in what was allowed to be said either side of the border, Facebook supported the regulations prescribed by the local authority. If they differed from place to place, as when Alberta closed restaurants and kept churches open while BC closed churches and kept open the restaurants, well, so much for following the science.Zuckerberg says he regrets knuckling under to government pressure. Critics have called him out on that as too little, too late.I am a little more forgiving. We should never have assumed that because Zuckerberg was the supreme tech-head who revolutionized the transmission of information, that he would have osmotically picked up the Anglo-American free speech tradition as he did so. He may be compared to any spectacularly successful young man who could afford a Jaguar before he could handle the power. But he knows now. “We’re ready to push back if something like the happened again.”I can accept that although in terms of protecting free speech rights, Elon Musk did it better; he just bought Twitter. It’s just that a tremendous number of Canadians also knew from the start, that they were being "handled." But that if they said so, they’d pay the price.That, none of us should ever accept, ever again.