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Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.
This makes me furious
https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/
I do not see where discussion lab leak is prohibited.
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There were even videos of chinese scientists trying to get the word out about the virus and the lab leak liklihood. There was plenty of evidence, if you knew where to look. 'Evidence' is tangential to the decision making behind misinformation tags.
The problem is that "evidence" is pretty easy to find. Even the wildest conspiracy theories has pages and pages of links to their evidence. Who should evaluate the evidence for its credibility?
Why the Ministry of Truth of course
Ultimately responsibility is on us for allowing something like this to happen.
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How do you think it would play out if it is found that our government (e.g. NIH/CDC) supplied funding for research that created this virus? I suspect many countries would take notice.
> funding for research that created this virus? The very question demonstrates part of the problem here: there are ways that it could have been 'released' by the lab without being 'created' in the lab (or any lab). It's not clear to me that people are aware of this when the lab origin theory is discussed. Please don't prematurely make an assumption about what was going on in the lab. It's possible that some researche…
I hate that lab leak is being conflated with engineered.
I also think while we want to believe scientists are all honorable individuals that would always speak the truth there are a lot of incentives to not fess up to this and a lot of incentives of other scientists to downplay this theory.
This story is a real clusterfuck and really hammers home the point that humans are bad at dealing with probabilities and uncertainty. You mix some nationalism in and it becomes completely impossible to have a reasonable discussion. This article already starts with a false dichotomy: "I missed the furious initial skirmish in what’s become the Long Discourse Wars over the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from the Wu…
There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disag…
I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months.
I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to look more credible than it actually was.
That ruined the entire thing for me. It wasn't ethical or right to pick and choose pieces from a dishonest source -- The whole thing was thrown out much like not credible witnesses in a court case.
Again, I totally agree with the consequences of this and that it's not a good thing but if you met someone who talked about the flat earth nonstop and then told you about global warming, would you listen with the same openness if they believed the earth was round?
Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.
This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both. While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just…
As everyone here should know, it’s not like that: hosting can be awfully expensive, especially for media content. Social media companies receive money from advertisers, and use that money to host content from users and partners that hopefully makes those ads look appealing too. It’s that simple.
Should these companies be compelled by the government to display content that makes their customers (advertisers) look bad? That seems like an awfully deep intrusion into a private business.
If the social media companies truly were monopolies, that would be another thing. But it’s hard to make that argument when new entrants like Snap and TikTok are able to conquer entire market segments and reach $100B valuations in a matter of years.
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They never will, because there is no such intelligence, it was reported as a statement from an unnamed intelligence official. It's garbage.
What incentive would the US government have to lie about this though? They were funding research at that lab, I don't understand why they would want people to think lab leak is correct all of a sudden - if that's what you're claiming?
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And today Facebook lifted that ban: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...
The theory that "SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab" overlaps some with the theory that "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made", but they're not the same thing. According to the article Facebook's policy change is towards posts saying "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made". Did Facebook's policy ban posts which supported the "lab leak" theory but didn't claim the virus was "man-made"? Facebook's April 2020 covid-19 policy notice only mention…
They are objectively independent arguments.
If they overlapped you couldn't say this: "SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab" and "SARS-CoV2 was not man-made". But you can.