Let’s not forget that talking about the lab leak hypothesis last year resulted in censorship among social media platforms and YouTube
This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.
This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.
Also I don't recall the specific fact check messages but if they were in line with "there's no hard evidence of a lab leak" I'd say that's still pretty accurate.
No speech should be censored.
That being said, social media sites flagging posts is very different from outright censorship. It's not uncommon for someone to actually get censored/removed from a site claiming its censorship over discussing some topic when really it was a history of dipshit behavior and flagrant TOS violations.
so, the vast majority of social media then? what makes this issue so special? why did all of the major social media networks censor/"flag" anyone publicly speculating only certain speculations about this issue?
Censorship is bad even when legally permissible. And we should still fight corporations acting unethically even when the law is on their side.
What they deem outright information may in fact be true. And even allowing clear misinformation (1+1=3) is important. We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it. Using 1+1=3 analogy, wouldn’t you want people to rally around tooling people to learn math?
Flagging misinformation is attempting to educate people.
No it wasn't. The media often takes the most extreme case in order to denigrate the whole side that they don't like.
First, reporters are incapable of discovering this information on their own. They just don't have the tools. Investigatory bodies do, and reporters would have to wait.
Secondly, there were multiple plausible ideas about what could have happened. The drum was beaten on only one of them. Trump got caught with his pants down because as with everything else he's ever been a part of, he was woefully unprepared and out of his depth.
Third, and tying in with the first point, the more important story to virtually everyone was not how the first people were infected, but what the response and fallout of the infections were.
So again, you had a bunch of clueless, embarrassed political partisans who got caught with their pants down, and their base ate up the blame-shifting because of their xenophobic tendencies.
Should the scientific community rally to the opposition of the current unpopular president? That doesn't seem like a good idea.
And this last point is a fascinating common non sequitor. That's not even what happened; we had the media clamoring that it came from that market and any talk of the lab is racist and/or xenophobic. Do you think any investigation of the lab would have jeopardized the public? Worse than the visceral eating bats (i.e. selling bats for consumption)?