EDITORIAL: Next pandemic, let’s have facts, not fear

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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted this week that he allowed the White House to suppress information on the social media site during the pandemic. That’s both shocking and disturbing.

In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House judiciary committee, Zuckerberg admitted the White House pressured Facebook to shut down discussions about matters related to the COVID-19 pandemic and about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and now regrets it.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humour and satire,” Zuckerberg said in the letter.

He has the final say on decisions to take down material, and he’s since changed the way Facebook operates so it won’t happen again.

The response from the White House sought to justify their actions.

“When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” it said.

“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.”

So if they leaned on Facebook to keep information from us, what else did governments hide? It’s tough to make “independent choices,” if politicians are censoring the information we receive.

This raises serious questions. What else weren’t we told? Canada hasn’t had a national inquiry into how the pandemic was handled. In the U.K., an exhaustive public inquiry made damning revelations.

A behavioural expert testified that the government’s messaging deliberately focused on “fear and shaming.” Sound familiar? This country treated those who balked at vaccine mandates and prolonged restrictions as outcasts.

Canada had some of the longest lockdowns in the world. Businesses suffered. Children were kept out of schools longer than most other Western nations. We’ll never fully understand the damage social isolation caused our kids or the toll it took on their schooling. Yet those who questioned the government over their handling of the pandemic were mocked and ridiculed. Now we know the White House meddled in what information we were allowed to have.

In future, pandemics should be treated like a health emergency and not as a propaganda campaign.