Facebook’s ‘ministry of truth’ is now threatening legitimate scientists with bans for calling out the lies of anti-genetically modified food activists. It is an extremely worrying development.
.If anyone still naively believes that Facebook is a force for good and not the vanguard of the elite’s pacification of public life, then last week’s announcement that it would ban a prominent researcher from its platform should have the alarm bells shrieking.
The issue, according to Facebook, was a post from 2015 (yes, six years ago!) by a University of Florida geneticist called Kevin Folta. His crime? He took two anti-pesticide activists to task for making misleading statements about the weed killer glyphosate in an opinion piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The authors falsely claimed the herbicide causes cancer and that the Journal acknowledged the causal link between the two.
Folta simply pointed out both the falsity of their claims about glyphosate and the insidious attempt by them to give legitimacy to their falsities by associating it with the NEJM.
It should be pointed out that one of the authors, Charles Benbrook, had already been exposed as having taken $100,000 from organic food companies to conduct ‘studies’ that would make their products look good.
For highlighting the falsities in the opinion piece and pointing out that the NEJM did not editorially endorse the claims about the health effects of glyphosate, Folta was accused of violating Facebook’s ‘community standards’. Facebook, the truthsayer general, issued a warning that his account could be suspended if he committed another offense.
There are three remarkable and worrying things about Facebook’s behaviour.
First, without the knowledge or credentials, it has the breathtaking arrogance to intervene in a science-based dispute. This is very disturbing because it suggests there are no limits to which its censoriousness will go. Threatening to de-platform a prominent scientist speaks volumes about Facebook’s tenuous and promiscuous relationship with truth.