Social media companies are caught between a rock and a hard place. They don’t want to be faulted for allowing misinformation to proliferate, but they also don’t want to be accused of censoring the truth. Sometimes they ban discussion of something because it’s seen as spreading misinformation, but then it later turns out what they banned might not have been so false after all, so they have to reverse their actions (as Facebook did recently with discussion of COVID-19’s origins in a Wuhan lab). Should Facebook just not have banned discussion of “lab leak theory” in the first place? What standards should social media sites use to determine whether something is “misinformation” and deserves to be banned from their site? What does this “reversal” reveal about the state of internet “fact checking”?

Topics: internet, facts, social media, social networking, truth, lies