‘The tech companies insist that the corona pandemic of 2020 will not be a repeat of the US presidential election of 2016. With millions of lives at stake, economies collapsing and hunger spreading, they will not rake in the advertising revenue generated by fake news and Russian disinformation this time round. They are responsible corporate citizens. Or so they wish us to believe.
Early in the lockdown, YouTube and Facebook made a great fuss about removing a David Icke video in which he claimed the coronavirus wasn’t a virus but a sinister sickness spread by 5G networks. Asked about attacks on phone masts by his confederates in duncery, Icke didn’t fall over himself to condemn them. “If 5G continues and reaches where they want to take it, human life as we know it is over… so people have to make a decision.”
Facebook said it was “committed to removing misinformation which could contribute to physical harm” as it took down the interview with Icke and the London Real conspiracist site. (There’s little real about it, I should add.) YouTube said it had no truck with “conspiracy theories” and did the same.
They weren’t serious. If they had been, they would have banned Icke and his imitators. As it was, Facebook and YouTube did not say they could no longer tolerate Icke on their platforms. They gave him the aura of being a free speech martyr by removing one interview, which he gratefully exploited, then allowed him to carry on as before. At the time of writing, close to 500,000 had watched a recent Icke video entitled “Is There a Virus?” that YouTube had not taken down. Icke’s jowls bubble with suppressed fury. “They” were “redesignating” deaths from flu and from 5G waves as deaths from Covid-19, he explains. And why would “they” go to the time and trouble of doing that? Because “they” want to “destroy independent income” and impose a “massive fascistic global Orwellian control of the population”.’
