Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Big Tech is turning into Big Brother

[Getty Images]

The Big Tech social media giants are having to rethink their policy of censoring anybody who suggests that Covid originated from a lab near Wuhan, rather than through some local chowing down on sweet and sour pangolin testicles. This is because it now seems quite possible, if not probable, that the virus was kindly bestowed upon us by Chinese scientists. I don’t know either way, but I would suggest that a suspicion that the virus was man-made, given the proximity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, scarcely qualifies as a lunatic conspiracy theory to be banned from public utterance. But that’s what the Big Tech companies decided — almost certainly for political reasons. They did not like Donald Trump making such aspersions, nor his tendency to refer to Covid as ‘Chinese flu’ (because it came from China) and still less ‘Kung flu’.

By and large the major liberal institutions concurred: the utterly hopeless World Health Organisation refused to entertain the suggestion that the virus had leaked from the WIV and the major liberal broadcasters in the US scarcely covered the suggestion at all. A couple of leftish American journos were invited into the WIV and marvelled at how clean everything was, what nice space suits everyone wore and how people definitely weren’t throwing chunks of Covid out of the windows every few minutes, and thus gave it a clean bill of health. The idea thus got pushed into the conspiracy theory dungeon, a realm of racists and reactionaries. The banning of this idea, that the virus was man-made and leaked from a Chinese lab, was not because it was wrong, necessarily, but because it came from the political right and challenged the liberal view. How kind it is of them, then, to think again.

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