Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.
It's one more example of how yesterday's "misinformation" can become tomorrow's "information", and how dangerous it is for sites to censor entire conversations because they (or their so-called 'fact checkers') believe in one side of a narrative.
Will there be apologies given to the people banned, isolated from participating in socialization during a pandemic where online communication was a vital tool for human connection?
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?
Is that a serious question? Here's a better one:
Who has the right to tell others what they may, and may not, decide for themselves?
Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.
Facebook's policy page only mentions censoring content suggesting that the virus was "man-made". Did Twitter actually ban users who suggested _only_ that the virus leaked from a lab? I'd be surprised because I follow some fairly big accounts there which have posted about the lab leak theory.
I hate how it feels like there's such a "collective narrative" for everything now days with the internet. Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Its like we've been absorbed into the internet consciousness and talking to a person is like talking to "the internet brain".
Absolutely. Discussion with friends about the goings ons of the world frequently just turns into taking turns regurgitating what we can recall from NPR and NYT's The Daily.
To me what gives me credence to the "lab leak theory" more than anything, was China's behavior during and initially after the outbreak. Where they thwarted any investigations from WHO or anyone else and arrested journalists even attempting to cover it. Now we have additional information of lab workers being sick back in November...I genuinely wonder why people immediately jumped in to defend China's actions through t…
I think given the demagogue POTUS and the mob of crazy followers, it was in the public interest to avoid agitating the mob. Even Facebook had the sense to realize that. As it stands, asian people are getting targeted for attacks in the street by deranged individuals.
That is called guilding the lilly. Long term the erosion of trust causes more damage than the white lies avoid. And it shouldn't be Facebook's call.
I hate how it feels like there's such a "collective narrative" for everything now days with the internet. Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Its like we've been absorbed into the internet consciousness and talking to a person is like talking to "the internet brain".
People stopped reading the source material, and started just parroting the talking points. It's even gotten to the point where people are even convinced the talking points are the source material.
The problem is that this is Standard Operating Procedure(tm) for China for anything which might upset the hoi-polloi. Trying to predict what China will execute people for is like reading entrails.
> The problem is that this is Standard Operating Procedure(tm) for China When you say "China", do you mean the Department of Health, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of Trade, or the Chinese government, or the Chinese people, or some Chinese guy? It makes as much sense to attribute a Standard Operating Procedure to "China" as it does to attribute something like that to "America", or to say "Americans t…
What you said does not make sense at all. All Chinese government branches are directly under the command of the CCP. Even China's top court rejects the idea of juridical independence [1]. To say China is equivalent to U.S is totally ignorant.
>I think this will result in a rethink of how we tag unresolved topics as "False Information" or before enough facts are gathered. Wishful thinking perhaps, somehow I doubt most of the media/gov't figures who dismissed these claims did so in good faith to begin with.
Please be explicite iF you are going to make such accusations. What "bad faith" reason do you postulate motivated these actions?
I wouldn't use the word bad faith, but I think for a lot of people it was very likely motivated by political/social pressure more than by trying to find the truth. In a positive light one could interpret some of the dismissal as an effort to combat anti-Asian racism occuring here. In a somewhat more negative light one might think it was simply the move to make to avoid
even remotely aligning with conservatives. There were probably also dynamics going on with foreign politics, but even just on US soil there was more than enough politicization of the issue.
Isn't this basically the default behavior of China and/or other communist/dictator countries? I just rewatched HBO's Chernobyl, and that was the underlying premise about how badly the gov't wanted the thing to be played down until it was just too much to hide. The superiority of those in charge cannot be brought into disrepute in any way. Same thing with COVID-19. I just think that Bejing has a tighter grip on things…
Well. The upper estimates for Chernobyl-related deaths is 6000. Legasov's projections in the 80s cited 40000. That's nothing compared to COVID, and COVID is more global for sure (meaning that most people in most coutries experienced the effects of the pandemic on themselves). Nuclear disaster sound scary, but COVID is actually objectively scarier. (Not sure which way you meant the comparison goes)
I meant if Moscow kept a lid on the Chernobyl situation and did not allow them to "fix" it as that would have admitted that Soviet engineering was falible. Had the various nightmare scenarios been allowed to happen (meltdown reaching the water table, etc) due to pride, then Chernobyl could have been so much worse. Could COVID had been mitigated from becoming a global pandemic if "pride" had not affected Bejing?
Have you got a link to examples? I’m wondering if they weren’t also saying that China deliberately leaked the virus. Saying “it is possible but very unlikely that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab” is talking about the lab-leak theory. Saying “the virus was cooked up and leaked from a Wuhan lab to hurt Trump’s re-election chances” is also talking about the lab-leak theory.
A Infamous case was Twitter baning Zerohedge because of it. And all that Zerohedge did was point out a lot of public documents, nothing private, and no bioweapon theory. (Twitter claimed Zerohedge had doxxed the scientist, but Zerohedge only had shown the official lab website and documents from it). https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...
I think it's pretty obvious why they were banned:
> The article, posted under the pseudonym "Tyler Durden" (the fictional character played by Brad Pitt in the movie "Fight Club"), was titled "Is This Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?" It included a photograph of a scientist at Wuhan's Institute of Virology and suggested that anyone curious about the epidemic might want to pay him "a visit."