Facebook should never have stifled the debate about Covid’s origins | Hacker News Reader

Facebook should never have stifled the debate about Covid’s origins

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49 pointsfortran7717 comments

I think the issue is people's belief system kicks in. Even now, people read this probably think: I knew it was from the lab!

Well no, we don't know where it's from yet.

I personally felt the messaging had always been that we don't know the origin clearly but there are a few possibilities, a lab leak being one, wet markets another, and bats a third.

I could see though how there could have been a "conspiracy" minded movement who'd start to hold strong beliefs of a lab leak and then mix that in with anti-asian racism and such. Then it becomes political, and probably people start posting things that make it sound like it is for sure a lab leak, and all that.

As an example, in more Chinese driven countries, I had read, there are lots of theories about how the virus is American made from a lab at the Maryland military base.

Basically all these conversations are about "pointing fingers" and "pushing blame". It's very political, and the truth will be hard to come out. Personally I think best not to care where it's from, we still have to deal with it none the less.

When there are two options, and one seems a little more obvious, but then there is a seemingly coordinated stigmatization of that option and undue consensus on the other option, then that starts to feel like a pretty strong data point in its own right.

Yes, it is suspicious not to let an independent committee audit the lab, and to disallow access to all information related to it. I'm not going to deny that. It also doesn't make it a cold hard proof.

But I do know that pissing of China at the start of a pandemic isn't a good way to help the world mitigate the pandemic either. You need international collaboration and for everyone to work together and relay what they learn of the virus and its transmission and all that.

At my work, we have policies similar where in the case of a production event, you don't blame the dev who released the bad code or made the faulty change, because doing so creates an atmosphere that doesn't help with root causing and fixing the issue.

It's probably best if lay people focused on their families and their work and their general well being, however, I don't know if the best idea is to suppress information, particularly information that is then revealed to be true. It creates a massive distrust in our governing institutions. For instance, I plainly don't trust any of our tech companies at all, nor the government, nor the media with the truth about basically anything. They have all shown they are incapable throughout this pandemic. Not sure having that level of societal disfunction allows people to focus on their families, their jobs, and their general well being.

> with the truth about basically anything

I feel maybe you've got some expectations that don't make sense?

If you have symptoms and go to the doctor, she doesn't know the truth of your ills and the sure guaranteed way to cure you. She'll simply apply a vast knowledge set to the possibility of what it could be you have, and what has sometimes work to cure it in the past.

If your expectations are such, then I feel the media, companies and governments institutions have done pretty well.

I don't know where you get your information from, but it's not like the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis is new, it's been reported on plenty of times, so did the wet market hypothetisis, so did the bat one, and even the lab leak from an American base was reported.

Now which one is true, well, again tone your expectations, when have we known the lineage of anything to 100% accuracy? We constantly send people to jail who were innocent even with a full trial. We still have no clue where we come from. There are still people who don't know who their parents are, or even when they were born.

If the virus comes from nature, it'll be pretty hard to be sure where it originated, you could maybe trace the earliest known sighting, but that's it.

If it comes from a man made lab, there's clearly very powerful actors hiding the evidence, so again, that'll be pretty hard to prove unless people just all came clean unambiguously, but even now, it's become so political, would they be forced too, scape goated, or coerced? We'll never know.

I feel people want truths, but the world is made of "best guesses".

So I think we should look at our institutions methodologies instead, could they have guessed better? If so, why they failed to do so? Did they ignore sources of data, did they make assumptions they forgot to attach a confidence against? Were they politically biased? Etc.

Didn’t fact checkers also reverse their opinions, which primarily backs FBs misinformation enforcement? I have a hard time personally squaring my desire to limit misinformation spread on social media (Holocaust denial, etc) with my lack of desire for SM platforms to become truth deciders. This feels like a normal occurrence of the system working mostly correctly: experts widely discount the lab leak theory and FB decreases the spread of perceived medical misinformation, experts reverse that opinion and FB stops enforcement.

Discounting the lab leak theory always seemed very politically motivated to me (although I am not sure exactly what the motive was).

It always seemed very suspicious that a definitive conclusion about the origin was drawn so quickly despite us barely knowing anything else about the virus. It also seemed incredibly suspicious that there was such a large effort to repress anyone who questioned the origin.

The cherry of irony on top is how considering all possible theories of origin was labeled “science denial”, but appealing to authority with questionable motives was “trusting the science”.

The solution is to have a much higher evidentiary threshold.

Facebook is just a spout of propaganda paid for by the highest bidder and targeting the most vulnerable and gullible. The brain cancer of civil society.

The ability the stifle conversation will always end up being applied in the wrong situations and it’s better to do nothing at all then to get it wrong.

More deflection from the not so mainstream media outlets who pretend not to be aligned with the MSM.

The next "scandal" is the issue of thousands of people dying needlessly because the Govt, FDA and NIH claimed that there were no outpatient treatments available for Covid and drugs like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were ineffective.

The infamous "stay at home until Covid begins to kill you" scandal.

IMO Google should not try to become an arbiter of truth either. Nothing good can come from it. Provide context yes, reflect the discourse yes, perhaps even bias to academics & take a clearly marked official opinion/positio, but never ever ever censor much do so when there is no overwhelming long standing consensus.

Could Facebook benefit from helping the Chinese regime save face? [0] Seems their founder has some double allegiances and a financial incentive to please the regime.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S20BoxH8W9g

I dunno, someone I know got into a particular conspiracy site where the "theory" snowballed into "covid was bioengineered by china, and once everyone gets vaccinated they'll release a second engineered virus that kills vaccinated people due to Antibody Dependent Enhancement, therefor it's safer for me to not get vaccinated and just stay indoors for the next 2-4 years instead"

Imagine if that kind of thing went mainstream before the vaccine rollout.

Is that even technically feasible?

In a fantasy world where the virus communicates over 5G, anything is possible...

You don't need to censor free and open discourse to prevent something like that from being a mainstream view.

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