Verifiable

 So the nominally "world's richest man" is calling for Doctor Anthony Fauci to be prosecuted. If this sounds familiar, you may recall that this sort of thing has been rolled out from time to time for the past few years, perhaps no more horrifyingly than a year ago when Wyoming Senate hopeful Anthony Bouchard insisted that Doctor Fauci was lying and he should be executed for that crime. Back in 2020, a flurry of Tweets suggested that the good doctor had been arrested on charges of seditious conspiracy. These posts were untrue. 

Social media was a place where rumors and hoaxes abounded in the early days of the pandemic. What was real and what was less than real was a matter of whom you wanted to follow: Scientists and doctors or politicians and their conspiracy-minded minions. Access to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like allowed anyone with access to a keyboard a chance to pontificate on a global pandemic that no one understood. 

Which didn't keep anyone from lofting their thoughts, often announced as facts, about a disease that was killing four thousand Americans a day. Like the time that the nominally "world's richest man" let this Tweet fly: "Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April." This poorly aged guess was made in March of 2020. The nominally "world's richest man" was very wrong. By a few hundred thousand. 

It was around that time that the powers that used to be at Twitter put some rules in place to keep people from making absurd claims and spreading misinformation. Those rules were dismantled at the end of last month, shortly after the nominally "world's richest man" bought the company and started firing people and opening up the doors to the MAGAts and the cheats and the deniers of all stripes under the banner of free speech. Free speech that the nominally "world's richest man" would like visitors to his site pay him eight dollars to be "verified" because Stephen King scoffed at the notion of paying him twenty. 

So now it's December 2022 and the nominally "world's richest man" is using his new toy to call for the prosecution of the man who rode herd on an historic health crisis to be prosecuted. For what? Maybe if Doctor Fauci game him eight dollars...