When I first heard that Mark Zuckerberg was shutting down Facebook’s fact-checking department, my first thought was: Too little, too late.
That’s because I’ve had my own experience with his team of fact-checkers.
Back in February 2020, when I was the Sunday editor of the New York Post, China expert Steven Mosher pitched me a theory about how the coronavirus started. Back then, it was believed it came from a wet market in Wuhan, but Steven was unconvinced. He said it was much more likely it had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had been doing experiments with the coronavirus for years.
This was before the lockdowns, and before Covid had spread across America and killed millions worldwide. Some experts had just started talking about the possibility of a global pandemic.
I was happy to publish Steven’s piece, because I figured the world would want to hear an alternative idea at an important moment from a social scientist who had lived in China and written books about the country.
I was right about the story. (In fact, the lab leak theory is now seen as the most likely explanation for Covid’s origins.) But I was wrong—and naive—to think anyone in power would want to hear it.
We published the piece on February 22, under the headline “Don’t Buy China’s Story: The Coronavirus May Have Leaked from a Lab.” It immediately went viral, its audience swelling for a few hours as readers liked and shared it over and over again.
I had a data tracker on my screen that showed our web traffic, and I could see the green line for my story surging up and up. Then suddenly, for no reason, the green line dropped like a stone. No one was reading or sharing the piece. It was as though it had never existed at all.
Seeing the story’s traffic plunge, I was stunned. I thought, How does that even happen? How does a story that thousands of people are reading and sharing suddenly just disappear?
Later, the Post’s digital editor gave me the answer: Facebook’s fact-checking team had flagged the piece as “false information.”