
Twitter Suspends Chinese Virologist Acc Who Claimed Coronavirus Was Made in Lab - imheretolearn
https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-suspends-dr-li-meng-yan-wuhan-lab-coronavirus-covid19-1532193
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kstenerud
This is important because it marks the point where we cross the Rubicon into
territory where social media companies become arbiters of truth.

It's not so much a question of the actual content in this particular case.
What's important is that we're no longer limiting ourselves to censoring
harassment, incitement to violence, or posts that damage public health or the
democratic process. This kind of censorship steps well into the domain of
political speech, and regardless of the merits of this particular decision,
the long term effects as this kind of censorship becomes normalized won't be
good, especially when it's so easy to silence people with the flick of a
switch.

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triyambakam
I definitely agree, though would you say this is the defining event across
that line? It seems there has been so much censorship already in the past few
months

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e9
This person has real credentials, she co-authored paper on COVID-19 that was
published in Nature magazine:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2342-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2342-5)

~~~
zxcmx
Reposting comment from dup at:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24501195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24501195)

You don't have to go back far (author -> paper -> author affiliations ->
sponsoring foundation ...) before you literally find Steve Bannon's face
staring out of the page at you.

I have no idea whether the arguments in the paper are credible or not (I'm not
technically qualified to assess them) but the source seems to have a very
clear political agenda. That doesn't invalidate their claims but I can't take
them seriously without hearing from a more independent source.

There are some fairly distinct signs of media engineering all over this story.
Just little things like the paper downloads with the name "The_Yan_Report.pdf"
\- what scientist uploads their paper with that name to Zenodo? That sort of
thing.

~~~
kstenerud
But it still begs the question: Why are they being censored?

Regardless of how much BS this person is spouting or who is ultimately behind
it all or what their intentions are, we generally hold that someone has a
right to spout as much BS as they want so long as it doesn't put people or the
democratic process in danger.

~~~
zxcmx
If they are being censored it is clearly not working because the story is all
over the news.

It is possible they are being censored in some places because they look
exactly like an influence operation, and COVID-19 misinformation is a huge
problem for online platforms right now.

We have people out in the real world right now protesting about Bill Gates'
mind control vaccine - activated by 5G - because they have been "memetically
compromised" via social media.

I expect it might have gone a little differently if the claims in the paper
had been peer reviewed.

