Out-quoted from this article titled Facebook overrules the opinion of individual doctors:

“We do not want to become the arbiters of truth. I think that would be a bad position for us to be in and not what we should be doing,” Zuckerberg said. “But on specific claims, if someone is going to go out and say that hydroxychloroquine is proven to cure COVID, when in fact it has not been proven to cure COVID, and that that statement could lead people to take a drug that in some cases, some of the data suggests that it might be harmful to people, we think that we should take that down.”

Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner challenged Zuckerberg and suggested that this is a “legitimate matter for discussion” and patients and their doctors should be deciding whether hydroxychloroquine is the right medication:
“There still is a debate on whether it is effective on either on treating or preventing COVID-19 and I think this is a legitimate matter of discussion and it would be up to a patient and their doctor to determine whether hydroxychloroquine was the correct medication, you know, given the circumstances.”

But Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook would be making the final ruling, regardless of some doctors’ opinion on the matter, and that his company’s position is: “Stating that there is a proven cure for COVID when there is, in fact, none, might encourage someone to go take something that could have some adverse effect so we do take that down.”
Facebook overrules the opinion of individual doctors.

My friend commented on my post:

It is not freedom of speech to lie to the public on matters of healthcare. Or, well, most anything if it is a provable lie. I have NO problem with this.

Here’s what came up for me.

How does one know it’s a lie?

I’m pretty sure there’s no law about freedom of speech and lies being mutual exclusive except as related to slander/libel. Incitement is restricted but lying is not necessarily incitement.

Furthermore, our politicians lie to us all the time so why would it be any different if health professionals did that? Arguably politicians should be held more to account than medical professionals considering medicine is much more personal than politics. Which is to say one treatment can work in patient X that doesn’t work in patient Y whereas laws are applied to both X and Y the same way, at least theoretically.

If you can’t see a video how can you assess whether its content is true or false (or perhaps more likely, something in between)? For example, if doctors were sharing their anecdotal experiences and their accounts indicate that in all of the instances they treated patients the patients did have positive results from the drug, that’s not lies. That may not be a study or sufficient evidence to declare it “a cure” because it’s anecdotal, but it is their personal experience and it is primary source material that is true at least for them. We don’t get to call it a lie because we don’t agree with it or, worse, because we have no evidence because someone else said that’s what it said and because of their interpretation, censored it. Not if we’re smart, that is.

Furthermore, even if someone does lie the lies themselves help people discern what is actually true. Sometimes we posit theories and we can push against those theories and discover what actually is true by doing research because we want to disprove said theories. Just like lies. If we don’t even know what the theories or lies are how can we assess them? And who does it serve to hide such information? Doesn’t it create mystique around the ideas which in a sense makes them more alluring, like other prohibition has through history (consider the 1920s and prohibitions on sex before marriage, as examples)?

Yes, I grant that one can say stupid people never get to discern these things but we can’t protect the world from stupid. There’s no regulating stupidity or ignorance (willful or otherwise). Ignorance is most definitely a condition we are born with and unfortunately, like stupidity, sometimes something we die with as well. In some cases, perhaps even die from.

I don’t know what was said in the video. If Duckerberg is asserting that it was lies please, show me the evidence. Good luck with that though: I bet there isn’t any evidence because it’s been censored. Thus we are supposed to trust his assessment of what is truth and what is lies rather than being offered the opportunity to figure this out for ourselves?

Who benefits from that? I don’t think society as a whole. It’s disempowering and infantilizing.

It’s true that it’s his platform and he has a right to censor as he sees fit. Still, I’ll be honest enough to say I judge you harshly and negatively if you support that practice. What happens when they come for your words? Who will stand with you if you won’t stand with others right to non censorship now?

* For those who wonder about this typo, in a world full of censorship, on a platform where you can’t type expletives without fear of censorship, instead of misnaming him and replacing the Z with and F, I pretended to type out the F word as my autocorrect does… because we know what people really mean when it says “duck you”.