The issue at heart here is how, once again, a social media site has stepped off the touchline and inserted itself into the process of deciding what is and isn’t true. Once again, Facebook has freaked out about ‘misinformation’ and overcorrected. The result? Its users were cut off from theories that could bear out to be true. Social-media censorship used to be a classifiably fringe issue. Four or five years ago, the only people in the West complaining about ’shadowbanning’ or their ‘posts being censored’ were on the outskirts of the conservative reservation — and honestly they sounded like thin-skinned losers. ‘My photos aren’t being liked as much as they used to!’ It was easier then to imagine how posts from people like Tommy Robinson or Milo Yiannopoulos might be misleading their followers or in breach of the terms of service. Then bigger figures on the right started banging the drum: Dave Rubin, Donald Trump Jr, eventually President Trump himself. To most people, Facebook was doing an adequate job of pretending to be an impartial umpire throughout the Trump era. But that all changed with the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop from Hell’. Social media sites restricted the circulation of that story on the grounds that they suspected it was ‘Russian misinformation’. They inserted themselves, without invitation, into the New York Post’s editorial process. They whipped off the black-and-white umpire jerseys and joined the blue team’s O-line. In doing so, they gave far-right cranks a reason to say ‘I told you so!’