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.