On his Real Time show on HBO on Friday night, Bill Maher lashed out at Google and Facebook for suppressing anyone merely asking the question if the coronavirus leaked out of a lab in Wuhan. Science is supposed to be about testing a hypothesis, but some of those had to be crushed...for politics.
"This should have never had a political dimension," Maher complained as he began talking about the pandemic. "There was never anything political about it." But clamping down on everyone's freedom to prevent mass infection can't help but be political. The media and the Democrats clearly sensed this was the silver bullet against Donald Trump. Big Tech seemed super-eager to squash any narrative that seemed Trumpy.
"Let me ask you about the media aspect of this," Maher said to his guests, "because I find this outrageous."
“Outrageous.” @BillMaher railed against Facebook and Google for banning and suppressing content about lab leak. “You were wrong, Google and Facebook....The CDC’s been wrong about a lot shit, this is outrageous that I can’t look this information up.” #RealTime pic.twitter.com/28dwaQGz9W
— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) June 26, 2021
MAHER: Facebook banned any post, for four months, about COVID coming from a lab. Of course now, even the Biden administration is looking into this. 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 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 not authoritative information."
Isn't this just the way Big Tech operates? They defined "authoritative information" as the liberal/establishment news media. Anything off the beaten path of staunchly Democratic "conventional wisdom" needs to be banned or discouraged. It gets un-banned when the liberals suggest it's okay....like after Biden wins. Maher continued:
MAHER: Well, you were wrong, Google and Facebook! We don't know! The reason why we want you is because we're checking on this s---! 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 s--- and the CDC has been wrong about a lot of s---. This is outrageous that I can't look this information up.
And now they're doing it with this drug Ivermectin. They threw Bret Weinstein off YouTube, or almost off YouTube, one strike away. YouTube should not be telling me what I can see about Ivermectin. 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.
Earlier in the show, Maher added: "China does bad things, they just closed the newspaper, the last standing newspaper in Hong Kong...There's pretty much no democracy in Hong Kong. Just like what they do with the Uighurs, gathering up this minority and putting them in camps. Liberals don't want to say anything because they're Asian. And they don't think very clearly about this, they conflate it with anti-Asian hate crimes here, it has nothing to do -- one has nothing to do with the other."
