Facebook and their independent “fact checkers” jumped through all kinds of hoops to try and prove I’m guilty of false reporting. And here’s how this circus went down.
Facebook censored my video detailing the internal emails that show how Dr. Anthony Fauci flip-flopped on mask guidance in the early days of the COVID pandemic. The social media website used independent “fact-checkers” to accuse me of false reporting, saying I’m misleading our audience about the safety and efficacy of face masks and whether Fauci knew all along that they weren’t effective at stopping virus particles. Then they strangled our social media reach, penalized our videos, and put another red flag on our page.
The tech company and their independent “fact checkers” jumped through all kinds of hoops to try and prove I’m guilty of false reporting in a video MRCTV posted saying Dr. Fauci mislead the American public about the effectiveness of slapping a piece of cheap drug store cloth over your face to stop what was treated as the most deadly pandemics since the Plague.
Their argument #1: Facebook claims Fauci’s advice to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell in an email dated February of last year telling her not to bother wearing a store bought face mask was consistent with CDC mask guidance at the time.
I never said it wasn’t. In fact, that’s the whole point. Fauci admitted to Burwell that face masks were ineffective at stopping the movement of virus particles back in February. A couple months later, he was advocating that everyone wear them. That later guidance, which was pushed by the CDC, led to unmasked people getting assaulted in the streets, and businesses being fined for not forcing customers to wear them. Yes, the guidance changed. Fauci’s guidance changed. That’s the issue.
Facebook argument #2: Fauci never actually contradicted himself on the efficacy of masks.
Here’s how this one goes. Health Feedback claims that when it comes to masks, Fauci was actually consistent all along. Despite the fact that his emails show him telling Burwell that the fabric of store-bought face masks wasn’t good enough to keep out virus droplets because they were small enough to pass right through the material. In fact, the cloth these masks are made out of is so ineffective, he said at the time, that they’d only be slightly beneficial to protect you even if someone sneezed or coughed directly on you, suggesting they couldn’t even filter out most large droplets. Just weeks later, though, Fauci was advocating for the general public to wear those same, store-bought face masks by saying they were good enough to keep sick people from giving the virus to someone else. At no point did he ever explain how a facemask made of material that can’t filter the coronavirus out is at the same time effective at keeping that same virus in. Either the virus can pass through the material, or it can’t. Pick a lane.
Which then leads us to Facebook argument #3, which goes something like this: Well, Fauci actually did contradict himself, but it’s only because he didn’t actually know how viruses work.
In this round of mental gymnastics, Health Feedback claims that when Fauci said viruses were small enough to pass through face mask material, he wasn’t accounting for the fact that viruses don’t travel on their own, but attach themselves to larger respiratory droplets, which are big enough to be stymied by a $2 piece of cotton blend from Target. To make this argument, they quote Dr. Alex Huffman, an aerosol scientist at the University of Denver, who told FactCheck.org that, “Early on in the pandemic, prevention messaging was coming primarily from infectious disease experts who have little to no training in aerosol science”.
Huffman explained that viruses themselves can indeed be too small for a paper or cloth mask to filter. However, “viruses don’t fly out of your mouth by themselves,” he said. “They are encased in droplets.”
“To Dr. Fauci’s great credit,” Huffman said, “he changed his perspective, learned a little about aerosol physics, and started listening to a broader audience of experts, including aerosol scientists.”
So Fauci did contradict himself, then. Oh but not because he knew masks didn’t work – it’s because he didn’t understand how viruses work, despite being one of the nation’s top experts in the field.
So now, I’m being accused of false reporting because the director of the nation’s largest public infectious diseases agency – who has held that position for 37 years, been published in every credible scientific journal in the world, and whose claim to fame includes spearheading federal efforts on other airborne viruses including the Swine Flu and SARS – simply wasn’t aware of the eighth-grade biology concept that viruses are not free-floating but rather are attached to respiratory droplets. In essence, their argument is that Fauci was such an incompetent moron who knew so little about germ transmission that he probably shouldn’t have been working as a cashier at Walgreens, much less as the head of our top infectious disease agency, and that’s somehow a more plausible and less insulting explanation for his public change of tune than suggesting he simply caved to mounting public and political pressure.
This is the man who later claimed he actually knew masks were important all along, but wanted to make sure they didn’t get scooped up by the general public before health care workers had enough stockpiled. But we can’t suggest he was lying about this. Uh huh.
And the funniest part of all this is that Facebook holds themselves up to be such stalwart defenders of facts and truth. Even though CNN and MSNBC were allowed to run rampant with debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theories that Facebook never censored or made them walk back. Reporters repeatedly pushed false claims that Trump called all Mexicans rapists and murderers, and that he said Nazis were “very fine people,” and that was allowed. Still is. It turns out the entire weeks-long hysteria over the whole Trump photo-op at St. John’s church was a bunch of media-manufactured bull crap, but Facebook never bothered to fact-check that, and those videos are still all over their website. But apparently, I can’t even read a Fauci email verbatim without getting the proverbial duct tape slapped on my mouth because I’m “interpreting it wrong.”
This is some serious water-carrying, guys. And it’s not hard to understand why. I mean, this is the man that these social media giants anointed as their god back when all this started, largely in an effort to make Donald Trump look like a buffoon at the time. Now he’s gotten caught red-handed as a two-faced hypocrite who’s bounced around like a ping pong ball on everything from masks to herd immunity to whether this thing leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
So now, Facebook has to censor anybody calling this out because it makes them look like idiots, too. Y’all can’t let it be known that the man you held up as the savior of humanity turned out to be feeding us all a bunch of bull for a year. You can’t dispute the lab leak flip-flop because now, even John Stewart’s not buying that. But you’re gonna bend over backwards on the mask thing because you have to find some redeeming quality here to keep from looking so stupid.
And now our 3.3 million-plus followers aren’t seeing our content because Facebook has decided it’s not in their best interest. Well screw that. Because we can still read Fauci’s emails for ourselves. They say what they say. And I’m not going to stop telling the truth just because some snot-nosed, left-wing tech geeks in Silicon Valley have decided they’re the gatekeepers of information.