The latest in a recent series of truth bombs dropped by comedian Bill Maher on his Saturday night HBO show was a well-deserved punch at Facebook and Google for their "outrageous" attempts to censor discussion about whether or not COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Maher also took aim at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) for their actions during the pandemic, suggesting that both organizations should not be above scrutiny.
"I find this outrageous," the "Real Time" host told his panel. "Facebook banned any post for four months about COVID coming from a lab. Of course now, even the Biden administration is looking into this."
THE NEW CENSORS? Censorship by the social-media platforms of Silicon Valley is threatening free and open discussion on some key issues. Remember how @Facebook shielded China for months by censorship posts about the origins of the coronavirus? @BillMaher blasts such tech giants. pic.twitter.com/ICTwMhDjIp
— Brahma Chellaney (@Chellaney) June 26, 2021
Google - a Wall Street Journal reporter asked the head of Google's health division - noticed that they don't do auto-fill searches for 'coronavirus lab leak' the way they do it for any other question and the guy said, 'Well, we want to make sure that the search isn't leading people down pathways that we would find to be not authoritative information.' Well, you were wrong, Google, and Facebook! We don't know! The reason why we want you is because we're checking on this shit! He said, ‘We want to ensure that the first thing users see is information from the CDC, the WHO.' That's who I'm checking on! The WHO has been very corrupt about a lot of shit, and the CDC's been wrong about a lot of shit. This is outrageous that I can't look this information up!
Maher went on to blast YouTube for censoring discussion about the use of the drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19.
"YouTube should not be telling me what I can see about ivermectin," he said. "Ivermectin isn't a registered Republican. It's a drug! I don't know if it works or not and a lot of other doctors don't either."
By now, it should be abundantly clear to any thinking person that 23-year-old tech company interns shouldn't be allowed to censor one or the other side of important discussions, especially when those discussions are being held between highly qualified individuals who happen to fall on both sides of an issue.
And censoring discussion about potential medical treatments is more sinister than doing it with the lab leak theory. I don't know whether ivermectin works to treat COVID-19 or not, and neither does YouTube, but suppose we find out six months later that it does work and we could have saved thousands of lives. Does Big Tech really want that on their conscience?
Earlier in the show, Maher discussed the left's conflation of anti-Asian hate with criticism of China, insisting that one "has nothing to do with the other." (via Fox News).
"China does bad things," Maher said before listing the Chinese Communist Party's actions, such as shutting down a newspaper in Hong Kong and imprisoning Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps. "Liberals don't want to say anything because [the Chinese are] Asian and [the liberals] don't think very clearly about this, so they conflate it with anti-Asian hate crimes here. It has nothing to do -- one has nothing to do with the other."