“In light of investigations into the origin of Covid-19 and in consultation with health professionals, we will not remove claims regarding the artificial origin of Covid-19 from our applications in the future.” Read email on Thursday from a spokesperson for an IT company. “We will continue to work with health experts to keep pace with the ever-changing nature of the pandemic and update our terms of use regularly to reflect new facts and developments.” he added.
The change in rules was first announced through the news portal Politico after US President Joe Biden instructed leaders of intelligence agencies on Wednesday to “redouble their efforts” to uncover the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, including the possibility that the pathogen was SARS-CoV. -2 The virus may have come from a Chinese laboratory.
Social media operators have been under constant pressure since the outbreak of the disease to filter misinformation about the epidemic on their roofs. Facebook said it has so far removed more than 16 million misleading entries related to Coronavirus and vaccines in violation of their terms of use. Incidentally, the company announced in February that it would expand the list of types of claims that would be removed from its apps, which then included content related to the artificial origin of the Coronavirus. A Facebook spokesperson said the company is regularly updating this record following the advice of health experts.
Earlier this week, US government officials said they were aware of a classified intelligence report circulated by government officials during the term of former US President Donald Trump, and which according to three employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November 2019 became so sick that they needed. Hospital treatment. However, it is not known how reliable US intelligence information is.
A few days before Facebook’s decision, a law was passed in Florida that would be the first in the United States to allow residents of the southern state to sue the community platforms of big tech companies if they censored or banned them. Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantes just mentioned as an example when the law was signed that countless people have been removed from social media platforms who previously discussed in their posts that the Coronavirus could have come from a lab in Wuhan, China. “And now this theory has become a central topic,” Al-Hakim said.
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