The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

Actually I knew about Shi's work early on because I talked with experts on the field and I shared all this info without problems.

The urge to ban that info in social sites came much later, when politicians got the message and considered that info dangerous(and because the West depended on Chinese supplies).

Most politicians are so dumb from the scientific and technical side that it took a long time for them to understand.

But it gives us and important lesson: If we want to inform ourselves, we should use alternatives to centralized social media.

It won't change anything. This isn't to do with facebook per-se, you'd just get "unlinked" from whatever arbitrators or aggreggators of a decentralized alternative exist, and still be labeled a social outcast and a conspiracy theorist. It's not a technology problem, rather it's one of imbeciles.

It also exists on HN. There is a bevvy of topics we are not allowed to discuss here because dang will point to some arbitrary guidelines saying how "that's not allowed here" and ban you. It's the same shit everywhere.

Basically, the moment you step outside of the given narrative and what is and isn't allowed to be questioned, you should have zero (or less than zero, actually) expectation of having a platform where you can voice your concerns, and heaven forbid that your online persona be linked with your personal details, because if it is, you are in so much deep shit it's not even worth it for most people to utter certain words.

Honestly I think Mastodon is already about as easy to use as possible. The real problem is the network effect, and the fact that the average person really just doesn't care enough about the benefits you get from it. What we really need is a libre, decentralized social network that's "cool" enough that non-tech people would have FOMO if they don't join. That's a much harder problem, one that I certainly won't be able to solve any time soon.

That's because the source regularly deliberately misinforms. So it's impossible to know if literally any of the claims here are completely made up.

For example:

_In December 2019, The Sun's political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, wrote an article for the paper titled "Hijacked Labour", alleging that "Jeremy Corbyn is at the centre of an extraordinary network of hard-left extremists pieced together by former British intelligence officers", a network ranging from Novara Media contributor Ash Sarkar to French philosopher Michel Foucault, who has been dead since 1984, that is alleged to be pulling Corbyn's strings.[204] It was later found that the ultimate sources for this claim included the antisemitic, far-right websites The Millennium Report and Aryan Unity._ [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_(United_Kingdom)#Far-r...

Stephen Quay is a "well known scientist" in a field completely unrelated to virology. He's a medical doctor who also does oncology research. Despite admitting to having no experience with Bayesian inference, he produced a "Bayesian analysis" of the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Another person who testified at that hearing, David Asher (also not a virologist, or even a scientist, but rather a former State Department bureaucrat), has been trying to argue for a year that SARS-CoV-2 is a biological weapon designed by the Chinese military.

The connection between Asher and Quay is that during the Trump administration, Asher led a group trying to prove that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon. Asher refused to go to actual subject-matter experts, and instead had Quay do his "Bayesian analysis." When Asher was finally forced by another official to bring scientists with relevant expertise in to go over his evidence, they tore it to shreds.[1]

These are simply not credible people to be getting your scientific information on SARS-CoV-2 from.

1. https://christopherashleyford.medium.com/the-lab-leak-inquir...