Underfire Zuckerberg surfs with a hydrofoil fitted with ‘shark deterrent’ stripes in Hawaii

View
comments

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been spotted surfing in Hawaii as he faces a storm over his company’s censorship of claims that Covid-19 may have been man made.

The underfire tech billionaire was photographed with a state-of-the-art hydrofoil that appeared to be fitted ‘shark deterrent stripes’ while out in the shark-infested waters around the island of Kauai. 

On Tuesday, the Facebook founder, 37, was pictured coming ashore after a session on his hydrofoil, which has been painted with camouflage stripes in a bid to deter sharks.

Experts say sharks are less likely to see the zebra-style patterns compared to block colors.  

Zuckerberg, who has a $100million estate on the island, was also seen wearing what is believed to be a shark deterrent ankle band designed by Sharkbanz, which uses magnetic technology to repel sharks. 

According to the company’s website, when sharks approach the band, they ‘detect the device’s strong electromagnetic field, which provides a sudden sensation that is thousands of times stronger than the signal produced by anything in a shark’s normal food chain.’

This creates an effect similar to suddenly having a bright light shone in your eyes, the company said, adding that it does not harm the sharks.

Hawaii has been the location of several shark attacks with beaches sometimes being closed following sightings. Six attacks have been reported by the state so far this year, all affecting swimmers and surfers. 

Zuckerberg has been seen out on the water several times in recent weeks and shared a video of himself celebrating his birthday on an Efoil earlier this month.

The Facebook founder took to the water on the  $12,000 motorized surfboard, sharing a short video of the outing on his social media account. 

The 60-second clip showed the billionaire cruising over the waves while wearing a black wetsuit and a helmet.   

The new pictures came as Zuckerberg faced heat for reversing a ban on claims that Covid-19 may have been man made. 

Republicans in Congress pounced on Facebook this week after the tech giant suddenly reversed its its policy of removing posts calling the COVID-19 ‘man-made’ after President Joe Biden ordered the intelligence community to review the origins of the coronavirus.   

‘The arrogance of @Facebook to decide where and how precisely covid originated, and who should be able to talk about it, is stunning. But sadly typical,’ fumed Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on Twitter.

‘The more we learn, the clearer it is that Communist China played a role in killing millions of people,’ said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.).

‘This is why Big Tech must never be the arbiter of truth,’ she said in a statement to DailyMail.com.

The blasts come as the ‘lab leak’ proposition has gone from a notion derided as a conspiracy theory to something viable enough that senior government officials are demanding be at least examined.

Ted Cruz tweeted: ‘This is why the Big Tech overlords shouldn’t be involved in fact checking’. 

Critics branded Facebook’s behavior had been ‘contemptible’ and begged them to respect free speech rather than ‘ingratiating’ themselves with states such as China, which has banned the website but remains a $5billion-a-year ad market. 

‘In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps,’ Facebook said in a statement on Wednesday.

That was a stark turnaround from February, when it came out with a statement on its policy for ‘removing more false claims about Covid-19 and vaccines.’

‘Following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines,’ it said then.

Since that time, many top scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, have said the potential of a lab leak should at least be investigated.

Fauci said at a hearing this week if he still believed the virus was a ‘natural occurrence.’

‘I still believe that the most likely scenario was that this was a natural occurrence, but no one knows that 100 per cent for sure,’ Fauci responded. 

‘And since there’s a lot of concern, a lot of speculation, and since no one absolutely knows that, I believe we do need the kind of investigation where there’s open transparency and all the information that’s available to be made available to scrutinize.’ 

China has reacted furiously to Biden’s call for a new investigation into the virus’s origins, accusing him of ‘politicising’ the issue and suggesting that US biolabs should be investigated instead.

Previously the lab theory was banned by Facebook, with several of the earliest reported cases of covid linked to a wet market in Wuhan, which sold a range of fresh food produce, including fish and animals. 

Some suggested it may have come from a bat, because they are host to a more diverse range of coronaviruses than humans or from a pangolin, a scaly anteater from Asia used in Chinese medicine and sold for their meat and skin.  

In April of last year, Facebook announced that it was imposing limits on ‘harmful misinformation about COVID-19’, including about how dangerous the virus is and how many people it was killing.

And in February of this year, the company announced that it was expanding its crackdown to include claims that the virus was man-made, insisting it was a conspiracy theory that had been ‘debunked’. 

But last year Sir Richard Dearlove, who served as chief of Britain’s MI6 spy service from 1999 to 2004, said last year: ‘I subscribe to the theory… that it’s an engineered escapee from the Wuhan Institute [of Virology].’   

Facebook has insisted that its ban was based on advice from experts, including from the World Health Organization.

A spokesman said: ‘Throughout the pandemic, based on guidance from leading global health organizations and local health authorities, we have been removing content with false claims or conspiracy theories that could cause harm. 

‘Our policies mirror the public health response and therefore in light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove claims that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps’.