At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high-school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events.

But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?

One reason is that a new breed of censors has been stifling scientific debate about masks on social-media platforms. When Scott Atlas, a member of the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force, questioned the efficacy of masks last year, Twitter removed his tweet. When eminent scientists from Stanford and Harvard recently told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that children should not be forced to wear masks, YouTube removed their video discussion from its platform. These acts of censorship were widely denounced, but the social-media science police remain undeterred, as I discovered when I recently wrote about the harms to children from wearing masks.

Facebook promptly slapped a label on the article: “Partly False Information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.” City Journal appealed the ruling, a process that turned out to be both futile and revealing. Facebook refused to remove the label, which still appears whenever the article is shared, but at least we got an inside look at the tactics that social-media companies and progressive groups use to distort science and public policy.

The “independent fact-checkers” of my article are affiliated with a nonprofit group called Science Feedback, which has partnered with Facebook in what it calls a “fight against misinformation.” The group describes itself as “nonpartisan,” a claim that I would label “Mostly False” after studying dozens of its fact-checks enforcing progressive orthodoxy on climate change and public health. I didn’t see anything that would have displeased the journalists and officials promoting lockdowns and mask mandates. Nor did I see anything that would have displeased a Democrat, particularly during the last presidential campaign. In October, when former President Donald Trump was predicting that a vaccine was imminent, the group labeled that prediction “Inaccurate” and proclaimed that “widespread Covid-19 vaccination is not expected before mid-2021.” (Fact check: The vaccine rollout began in December.) (Read more from “How Facebook Uses ‘Fact-Checking’ To Suppress Scientific Truth” HERE)

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Robert Spencer, whose Jihad Watch website documents the violence inflicted by Muslim extremists, is warning that such information may be cleansed from the internet.

He explains it’s because of a new lawsuit against Facebook complaining of “anti-Muslim hate groups.”

And the problem, writes Spencer, is that an Islamic activist group with influence on Capitol Hill is describing as “hate” groups legitimate organizations such as Jihad Watch, the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Center for Security Policy.

“Anyone who has been paying attention can see what is coming. This site and the others targeted will disappear from Facebook and ultimately from the Internet altogether, whether as a result of this suit or some other. This suit itself has a very good chance of succeeding, as Muslim Advocates is extremely powerful and influential,” Spencer wrote.

He cited a report from tech news site Engadget of a “consumer protection lawsuit” accusing Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of misleading Congress and falsely stating the company “removes content that violates its policies.’ (Read more from “Muslims Sue Facebook for Allowing Sites Exposing Jihad Violence” HERE)

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