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The media's lab leak fiasco (slowboring.com)
501 points by ksec 7 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 701 comments



There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disagreement among researchers.

I think this part of the text really sums up everything I hated about reading the news and social media in 2020. Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. I don't like being reminded of corporate sponsored social movements if I open facebook/google/amazon/twitter. I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it without a way to dismiss and select 'I already did, stop reminding me.' I don't want reddit creating a central sub-page for discussing [Current Event] within the narrow bounds of what their moderators think is acceptable. I don't like non-dismissable context text on twitter and under youtube videos that are often off topic and triggered by bad speech detection that simply take you to a link dump of regular news articles. I don't like the idea that there's an oligopoly on "truth" and "credible sources." No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking, and the reality that so much casual skepticism on a variety of topics was suppressed and equivocated with being a flat-earther is sickening.


Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event.

Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.


I think this is a good place for authorship attribution AI's. A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source.

Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum?

Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...


> "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."

Wow! That was unexpectedly - what should I say - candid?

And I actually appreciate you all being here : )

But please distinguish between

- "helping customers where they are" which is a great idea and

- secretly pushing an agenda.

And if anyone wonders about how do you distinguish between those two here's a rule of thumb:

in the first case if someone realizes you work for that company it feels good. In the second case it probably feels bad.


> A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source.

Certainly such a tool might be useful to someone analyzing disinformation campaigns, but it only goes so far.

If the intent with such plugins and other forms of human/AI moderation is merely identify the source of what looks like disinformation, you're going to disappointed to hear that those who are influenced by disinformation don't care what "the source" is. It's why meatheads on Fox News can blabber non-stop garbage and get the highest news media ratings in history.

Dealing with this problem with "plugins", at best, is entering an infinite game of wack-a-mole. It's fundamentally not a technological problem.

This kind of stuff has always existed, and yes, now it's hopped-up on internet speed and naive countermeasures now need AI to keep up. But it's still qualitatively the same thing as it was in the 1930's. It requires a long game to battle it involving leadership, an educated populace and a government that isn't grossly polarized and dysfunctional.

Sadly, I don't think we're up to the challenge at least in the USA.


Agreed about the whack-a-mole. Would be hard. Only a few people have the ability to lead projects that require so much mole whacking. I'm thinking of gorhill and ublock origin, for example.


> It's why meatheads on Fox News can blabber non-stop garbage and get the highest news media ratings in history.

Interesting how you had to throw a right wing site in there with your underhanded attack. So you think the left is immune to this? Can you actually get through a CNN article without wanting to vomit?

With that one statement you lost me entirely.


To be honest, I do feel that CNN and MSNBC have fallen off a cliff as far as quality is concerned in the last 10+ years. All cable news is pretty much a wasteland.

But there's a special place in hell reserved for Fox News.

As bad as CNN can get with its cloying reductive stories, they at least try. Fox News is end-to-end garbage. Sorry.


The site https://www.churnalism.com/ tried to do something like this before ML was accessible, but it seems to have died on the vine just a year later.


Creepy


You reminded me of this piece by Glenn Greenwald: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so...

> what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.

> All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.

> But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story.

> NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.


>In the intelligence community

What do you mean by this? And I'm not being snarky, really.


The US "intelligence community" is the CIA, NSA, etc.[1] Intelligence analysis is the business of trying to extract useful info from of noisy and deceptive data. Here's an introduction to the field.[2] See especially section 4.

4-11. Analyst have found the following rules helpful in dealing with deception:

- Avoid over-reliance on a single source of information.

- Seek and heed the opinions of those closest to the reporting.

- Be suspicious of human sources or sub-sources who have not been met with personally or for whom it is unclear how or from whom they obtained the information.

- Be suspicious of information that appears to be too easy to collect and is too perfect of a picture.

- Always look for material evidence (documents, reports, imagery) rather than relying exclusively upon what someone says.

- Look for a pattern where a source’s information has seemed correct and accurate initially, but then proven to be false.

- Generate and evaluate a full set of hypotheses at the outset of a task.

- Know the limitations as well as the capabilities of collection assets, sources, and potential deceivers.

This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...

[2] https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-IntelAnalysis.pdf


> Now this should probably be taught in schools.

It should. Under the name "media literacy".


>> This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools.

Not just schools, this should be taught to everybody.

One wonders how propaganda would react if this were to happen. Right now it is mostly non-physical information.

But when you have a critical mass of people & environment which is not conducive to standard propaganda, perhaps it will resort to creating a physical reality as a base to anchor upon. Not that this hasn't happened earlier, but it will become pervasive.

Would we be able to believe what we see then ?


> Not just schools, this should be taught to everybody.

Doesn’t everybody, at least in the US, go to school. By law?


I wasnt't familiar with the term, thank you!


So anything anonymously sourced from US govt. Officials should be considered "too easy to collect... etc "...seemed correct and accurate initially, then proven to be false." "Material evidence..."

Yeah if we did this the CIA would have a much harder time spreading bullshit. But yeah they'll still try with the "OMG you love Putin" To those in the media who actually exercise these recommendations. Maybe it's not even a totally baseless and disgusting slur every single time but it has happened so often now it's safe to assume anyone any good has been accused of being a Putin stooge at least once. Hilary accusing Bernie is my personal favourite. You may have others. Greenwald, Mate, Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, Assange, Snowden. Zero evidence for any of it, sure, but it's still possible one or more of them is. No reason at all not to treat that with total contempt given that each has presented evidence opposing in the interests of national security state propaganda and there's none at all for these Putin stooge smears.

Feel free to keep loathing Putin, I do, I just don't see him under the bed and switch my brain off the instant he's invoked. If you haven't seen that the CIA, NSA have real issues of criminality that is in need of serious reform, and many inside will eagerly break the law to avoid it consider what would get you to change your mind on that?

The corruption inside is a far, far greater threat to the USA than Putin (or Osama bin L. or Saddam or.. the next objectively evil bogeyman) could be in their wildest fantasies. Failure to reform is incredibly dangerous and weakens defenses massively.



>Which is a big problem.

Is it? What if the alternative is that people feel the wrong way about things?


I think they're saying that feeling the event instead of thinking about it is a problem.

A lot of times the news is all on about something as an emergency that will do something terrible if you don't pay attention to it. There may be some seed of importance in there to lend it credibility, but a large portion of the time it's simple manipulation and I ignore it on principle for that reason.

In other words, I usually tune it out because of that and instead go look for primary sources on whatever is making the news, instead, and even when I read the articles, I care only about the sources and whether I can verify them. I simply skip all the sections that are opinion.


This 1000 times. Any news org trying to invoke an emotional response should be treated as toxic. Get what important details you can from the article and move on. I don’t want AI to tell me what’s true, I want AI to remove the author’s bias.


If people agreed on what was the right and wrong way to interpret the world we wouldn't need democracy.


If we're going to talk about the intelligence community, then the same criticism that gets used against the media needs to be brought up: the Iraq WMD.


> In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources

Where on earth do you get this from?

In additional to the yellow cake fiasco, remember the pressure US and British intelligence came under find kompromat on UN security council members to bully them into voting for the Iraq invasion.

Complete and utter lap dogs.


>Where on earth do you get this from?

From local cops to the CIA comparing the same information from multiple sources is SOP for everyone who deals with unreliable information.


> No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking

Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article)

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-be...


This was an interesting read, but I think there's something missed with fact-checkers. They seem to be caught in a strict binary of true and false when there's often a third possibility: we do not have the necessary information to either prove or disprove a claim/statement.


The other issue is that they fail to categorise their "opponents" arguments into strong and weak claims.

So you often end up with articles arguing against strawmen, where the strawmen is considered to be the only view held by the other side. This isn't really useful.


There are alternatives ( at least around the World ), that include a limited range of conclusions from "true", "imprecise", "out of context", "manipulated" to "false".


I agree but I think it has to do with credibility and authoritative sources that used to be credible within some reason no longer being so.

I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months.

I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to look more credible than it actually was.

That ruined the entire thing for me. It wasn't ethical or right to pick and choose pieces from a dishonest source -- The whole thing was thrown out much like not credible witnesses in a court case.

Again, I totally agree with the consequences of this and that it's not a good thing but if you met someone who talked about the flat earth nonstop and then told you about global warming, would you listen with the same openness if they believed the earth was round?


It’s be fairly confused if a flat earther talked about GLOBAL warming.

On a serious note I’ve learned to not take anything as gospel. Facts aren’t binary, they sit on a spectrum and also in an ecosystem. Given the natural information compression that exists in thought and language it’s impossible to be too sure of anything. The one thing I’ve stopped however is being 100% sure of anything. Of course I will dismiss obvious BS from sociopaths but on the other end of the spectrum I also tread more lightly.


From the OP: "There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.

My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution."

I've also found this to be true on HN, though slightly less so. The above comment might be an example, where it oversimplifies something and everyone just appears to agree.


> There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.

That's been my biggest problem with most conversation I have. Nuance has been lost.

> fake consensus that can become very misleading

It's PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION / Social desirebility bias: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently convey, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. It include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580

Why would anyone admit to being a [Insert anything against the establishment/mainstream media narrative]? You just get vilified and attacked.

I know several people and many qualified people (doctors) who got banned from YouTube, FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit and got "Disinformation" label slapped on their posts. Even on HN itself, there was a strange stink in the responses to a few of my comments simply stating that we shouldn't simply ignore this theory. Most people were responding with links to places like Snopes, Politifact, NYTimes, WaPo, MSNBC etc - places which have shown their biases several times in history but people kept trusting them as "authoritative" sources. The "fact checkers" were doing nothing more than narrative control but it was enough to chastise people. Some were really mean comments. I would expect such responses from Reddit but I wasn't expecting it on HN. The biggest irony was that we were being accused of being in a cult.

Does anyone think these platforms will now go back and "uncensor" those accounts? Will apologies be issued? I doubt it.


You really hit the nail on the head with this comment.

Frankly I wish you were a journalist more than this author that we are commenting on. He lacks your judgment.

Just to add to your point the most obvious tell for these kinds of suppression activities is the utter lack of curiosity.

It should have been a trigger for curiosity and investigation immediately that this virus happened to emerge in the same city as China's only BSL4 lab. You know the BSL4 lab with NIH and NAID grants specifically specifying taking bat born Corona viruses and infecting humanized mice with them.....

Curious journalists would have identified these earlier.

Unfortunately, journalist these days appear to really really enjoy dunking on each other on Twitter and doing anything they can to own the right winger / white supremacist / whatever they are calling people that don't agree with everything they say.

That doesn't take much brains it just takes an affinity for sadistic behavior.


Is HN any better? I got censored and ridiculously rate limited today for trying to post a similar article.


>Is HN any better?

On topics that are so niche there are no discernible ideological battle lines it can be decent.


Many HN users seem confident they know the truth, and that they know which sources are credible, and are comfortable suppressing anything contrary to what they already think, often without explanation. I don't think HN is quite an echo chamber yet, but it's well on its way.


Lots of people who are extremely educated (i.e. vocational training) fail to grasp very simple concepts of arguing, debating and behave quite childish and immature in many other aspects of their life.

I spent about 20 years in academia, among the most "highly intelligent and prepared people" in the world, yet know 14-15 year olds who behave in a much more honorable way.


See also: the stereotype that physicists think they know everything because they know physics


A to the men


Woah woah woah who says the earth isn’t flat?


> I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it

I basically agree with the sentiment, but some of this stuff is tricky. We really do need everyone to get vaccinated, in the same way we need everyone to not dump their sewage in the middle of the street, in order to protect the health of the public at large.

Imagine we were living during WWII and having this discussion. Would you feel differently? Because I don’t think we could have won the war if we were simultaneously having major internal debates about who the good guys were.


Which "we" are you speaking for here - since you're saying you won the war I guess you must be Soviet? You were having major debates about who the good guys were at the time - you had a non-aggression pact with Japan right up until the final weeks, and that very much affected the course of the war.

The same goes for everyone else. France had major internal debates about who the good guys were. So did the UK. So did the USA. So did Ireland. Everyone took took particular actions on particular timelines, made particular compromises, and they were right to do so.


As far as I can tell this is a false premise. The scientific consensus on zoonotic origin was never really considered conclusive by anyone and was never really sold as being conclusive. There was a very strong backlash against the ridiculous theories spread by people like Tom Cotton that virus was engineered that absolutely soured the debate. And people like Trump and his sycophants who didn't just suggest lab leak but declared it as being overwhelmingly likely. That made honest debate extremely difficult. And even know the hand-wringing of "oh now they were right all along" is even worse. There was not then nor is there now sufficient evidence to declare this a settled debate. Trump is and was wrong. And Cotton shot himself the foot by ruining his credibility before trying to reset his opinion. In reality, we don't know. Zoonotic remains most likely. More investigation is warranted but is unlikely to turn up a smoking gun.


How can you read this then casually say Tom Cotton was spreading ridiculous theories that covid was engineered? One of the main points in the article is he never said that and what he did say was pretty reasonable. It’s ok if you think the article is wrong about that, but you should at least give a source for your claim at this point.


https://twitter.com/sentomcotton/status/1229202139232292866

He speculated that it could have been a bioweapon that was accidentally or deliberately released. You and I can speculate on twitter but a US senator should keep his trap shut on social media.


I guess I'm not seeing the problem with those tweets?

I mean, he lists four options, and identifies natural release as the most likely and intentional release as very unlikely. And it's expressed clearly, in full sentences.

By the standards of republican politicians on twitter, that's actually pretty good.


"By the standards of republican politicians" is a low bar and also a relevant topic. Cotton was more careful with his words than a lot of his comrades but he was very tightly allied with people (like Trump himself) who were well known for spouting complete horseshit. Cotton also did himself no favors when he was one of 6 senators to vote against protection for Asian-American victims of hate crimes.


There is no source for these claims. Just like with Trump, people get angry and upset with what they think he said based on the impression from the media, not what was actually said. Just look at the 'fine people on both sides' comment that was taken ridiculously out of context.

This same thing happened to Sarah Palin with the 'I can see Russia from my house' phrase, which she never said. It was part of a comedy sketch, yet it was used to attack her. It is absolutely ridiculous. No one is interested anymore in what is said, just what they think someone 'like that' would say.


Here is Sarah Palin actually making that claim on CBS. Not in those hilarious words but really and in fact. It's like 2 minutes long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nokTjEdaUGg

The fine people on both sides was truly as horrific as it was made out to be. They had a torchlight nazi parade where they chanted jews will not replace us and they murdered people.

Here is a pic of people flying as they were hit by a car.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/2017_Charlott...

On February 20th 2020 Tom Cotton speculated that it was possible that China deliberately released the virus or that it could be a bioweapon that had been released.

https://twitter.com/sentomcotton/status/1229202139232292866

This isn't a hypothesis a US senator should throw out on twitter because the right wing completely ignored the speculative nature or any qualifications and completely ran with Tom says they Chinese attacked us.


The grandparent didn't say nothing bad happened at the protest, they said that Trump's comments were taken out of context, which is completely true. Read the thing in context (here: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...) and it's clear that he's not defending white supremacists or anything of that sort.


The context was reported at the time and it still means exactly what people think it means. Here's his attempt to clarify

"I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general. "

Trump knows full well that this is a lie. No one was there because Lee was so great of a general and they love military tactics. They were there because he fought to protect slavery. There was absolutely no "both sides" about anything. In context he's still saying protestors were as much to blame as the counter protest and the counter protest had as much validity to their complaint as the protestors. These is exactly what everyone took his meaning and all the context and clarification make it very clear that he meant murdering racists are the same as peaceful protestors against violence.


I'm sorry but you personify the issue stated in this article.

The guys holding tiki torches were definitely white supremacists.

Most protesters who are in favor of preserving Confederate monuments aren't doing so because of slavery. I don't agree with them but I grew up around them in Virginia and it's much more complicated than "derp they love slavery derp".

The confidence you possess in your ability to read people's minds is likely unfounded since I've never met any human being who can successfully read others minds.


I hate to ad hominem but this statement is so disgustingly naïve it's difficult to fathom. The Confederacy existed to preserve slavery. It is theoretically possible for someone just be really into that 3.5 year span of history so, so much that they can't bear the thought of fewer statues or else they'll forget about it but I think that is far-fetched. I also don't believe they literally want to reinstitute slavery in 2021, but they are absolutely fighting to lionize people who fought to protect it. It is 100% equivalent to defending a statue of a Nazi general. And it is 100% racist whether they consciously accept it or not. There is absolutely no plausible explanation. And none of the explanations put forward by apologists are remotely convincing. The same people who think taking down statues is "erasing our history" are passing emergency laws to ban the 1619 Project from being taught.


You’re incorrect on nearly all of this and haven’t “broken out” of the forced narrative. All I can suggest is you go back to the primary sources yourself. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take your preferred media outlet’s word for it. Dig it up and decide.

The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning.

But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way.

Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.


The lab leak theory is not Occam's razor. We've had many, many pandemics and epidemics and none have been associated with research labs. We've had SARS outbreaks in China that are not associated with a lab. There is also no proof beyond circumstance to associate it with the lab.

And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency. Cotton was far more measured in his statements even if he was still stretching. I'm also saying that the MSM and scientific consensus only really threw a fit over the bioweapon theory and inflammatory rhetoric. Even the infamous WHO study said accidental lab leak was possible.


The fact that you aren't aware of the 1970s flu in the Soviet Union which was caused by a lab leak is telling. Again confident absolute statements from someone who doesn't really understand the topic they are commenting on.

There have been numerous lab leaks that are recorded in history and they happen every year.

After SARS it only took 4 months to identify the intermediate host which was a civet. After MERS, it took nine months to identify a camel as an intermediate host.

18 months later with vastly more scientific resources at their disposal and also technology that didn't exist for the other two like smartphones, no intermediate mammal host has been found yet.

The Occam's razor suggestion for this is the reason for this is the only intermediate mammal host that exists is a humanized mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining its lungs.

You know, the humanized mice that were specifically mentioned as being present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology by multiple sources including grants applied for and received directly stating this.

https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...

This entire comment is the personification of a person who has taken their political identity and with no self-awareness applied it to science. You have no basis for your confidence other than the hatred of your political enemies.

I watched brainwashed GOP folks cling to the WMD in Iraq myth for years after it was proven false. You might not be do different from them.


Its only recently that research labs could engineer these viruses. Only recently have you been able to engineer mice with human ACE2 receptors, and breed viruses in them. History is not what you base your conclusions on in 2020’s biochemistry.


It has been strongly asserted by the scientific community that Covid-19 bears no hallmarks of an engineered virus. In fact, no one in this thread is even suggested it was engineered. That's the whole point of the article. The "accidental leak" theory is being conflated with "engineered weapon theory". The only options on the table are "animal -> human" or "animal -> lab -> human". Both are plausible and we have no conclusive evidence one way or the other.


Engineering a virus, in the sense that you're talking about, is not what was meant. Allowing the virus to naturally mutate in an animal host, over thousands of generations, will get you to the same endpoint. This is gain of function research, the whole point is to find out if the virus could naturally evolve some feature you are interested in. Engineering it to do so would defeat the point.


This is not exactly accurate. But it’s easier to get to the full story if people accept the lab leak of an unmodified virus as a possibility. However, the “assertions” are misleading and have been debunked. The virus does appear to be chimeric. There is a missing link in both hypotheses, but the lab leak hypotheses offers a few possible explanations. The zoonotic hypothesis still doesn’t have an explanation for that part.


You're not actually refuting any argument the parent made.

First, pointing out that other pandemics have happened absent lab accidents doesn't negate all the evidence pointing in that direction this time. As far as evidence and probability goes (with regard to the potential evolutionary paths the virus would have had to have taken in the wild), the lab leak hypothesis is very strong. The simplest answer is that it leaked from the lab a few miles away studying this exact family of viruses.

Second, the parent wasn't saying anything about whether or not Trump was twisting the truth or being dramatic. His whole point is that the discussion was able to be hijacked by the simple act of a divisive figure talking about it. It's fine if people dismiss Trump (the smart thing to do honestly), but allowing that to bias you in the opposite direction without any evidence is making the exact same mistake he did.


> And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency.

except his CDC head claimed after the new administration took over that Trump's administration did have additional classified evidence that made it more likely. It is extremely likely that the intelligence community knew of the chinese researchers who had gone to the hospital (and maybe more) way before it was released to the public. By the time these facts are made public, they have been researched and assigned a high level of confidence.


Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.


This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both.

While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just a matter of Facebook / Twitter / YouTube needing a better moderation process - this is more fundamental. No person or organization - no matter how benevolent or wise - should have the power to declare truth in a society.

Fringe opinions need constitutional protection - regardless of the era or the technology.


What I would do, if elected Emperor over this, is to add warnings or links to debunkings of fringe theories, but never delete them.

The power to silence will always be abused.


> or links to debunkings of fringe theories

Sadly won't be helpful, and may actually make things worse:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backfire_effect

* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...


IMO I think it's useful to avoid getting moderates and people who don't know better caught up in the mess.

For people who are already convinced, they're already convinced. Banning the content entirely also doesn't help. People are very good at spreading information, even if you manage to ban all conspiracies from the internet, you have TV, the newspaper, private networks, and just word-of-mouth.

Another good tool would be to teach kids how to identify misinformation. You don't have to worry about belief perseverance when there's no belief yet.


However, in past decades, those other networks didn't cause the same level of propagation of misinformation.


I can't teach your kids to identify misinformation against your will and theirs.


That wikipedia link for the backfire effect directly mentions failure to reproduce the findings.

I will assume that's true, or you won't find this reply very convincing.


Of course this is undoubtedly true. However, deleting the information creates a Streisand effect and a much stronger belief perseverance and backfire effect compared to annotating the information with a counter-argument.

Between the three options of "delete", "annotate", and "leave untouched", I think the least-bad option is probably the middle one. It's not going to dissuade many people and will only reinforce beliefs for many, but there's not much else that can be done.


You clearly have a strong belief that it won't be helpful, so I won't try to argue with you.


Facebook already does this and people just claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”


I've been on Facebook since you needed an edu address. I've never had anything I posted flagged in anyway until recently during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. A friend posted a photo of a person filling up buckets with gasoline. I responded with "An oldie but goodie" and a photo of a woman filling up plastic shopping bag with gasoline. A couple days later I got a notification from Facebook that I was spreading disinformation. The image I posted was from 2019, not 2021 their notification said. As punishment, my future posts for a unspecified amount of time will get low ranked in everyone's feeds. Problem is, I never claimed the image was from 2021. I even called it an oldie. I've never run into trouble with Facebook's truthiness machine before but now I'm in some sort of penalty box for who knows how long. As far as I can tell, there's no way to appeal this or even let them know that their process is flawed. Facebook has labeled me as the spreader of disinformation and that's the end of it. Nothing else can be done. Their judgement is final. These are the people we want controlling the flow of information and this is the process we want them to use to do it?


I would expect that this was fully automatic response, so there was nobody reading your message. Facebook somehow detected that your photo was too old. On the internet "fake" photo's are frequently posted and it is understandable that Facebook takes countermeasures. It is really difficult to find a good solution.


> claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”

The "fake news" part is always disputable on a case by case basis, but the "elite" part is indisputable. A very small number of very wealthy people get to decide the range of opinions that are acceptable, and the deviations that get administrative comments. The mods aren't the auteurs - mods that correct incorrectly will be fired. Close calls rattle up the chain of command until they hit the CEO/Founder, who is often a billionaire, always very wealthy, always of a particular demographic.


Because it is? Telling someone what to think is the fastest way to guarantee that they will not listen to anything you say.


I’m simply responding to someone giving an idea that is already out there and doesn’t work.


Because much of it is fake news being pushed by the elite. Look at precisely what we're discussing: the lab leak scenario, which Facebook labeled with warnings (at best) or simply banned/deleted/removed (at worst).

And now, the media establishment is doing some kind of re-think, and it turns out that while far from proven, a lab leak (which covers a variety of scenarios, most not involving any kind of "engineered" virus) is a reasonable hypothesis. If that's so, why the capricious banning and warning labels?

We've seen similar situations play out in the past year with masks (at first, they were unnecessary and racist, then absolutely critical, now it's changing again). How about just let people decide for themselves? There will always be some conspiracists on both the left and right, but most people figure this stuff out in a reasonable manner.


> but most people figure this stuff out in a reasonable manner.

That's getting tenuous. Fully 25% of the populace believe "alternative facts" that their Representatives claim are true, but those Representatives cite those very people as the source of truth! It's "citogenesis" in the real world!


Of course some people will disagree.

I don't see that as a problem.


WARNING: BurningFrog aspires to be Emperor


You are assuming that the net negative for society is never high enough to justify kicking liars and crazy people off your platform. That seems like a remarkable conclusion. Lets take for example Alex Jones spreading the lie that kids didn't die in school shootings and the people talking about their dead kids are making it up. Do you keep spreading it until a whack job kills somebody? Until some parent commits suicide?

What about health misinformation that if propagated will kill thousands? How many dead is enough to act?

What if false info about vaccines keeps enough from being vaccinated long enough for a new variant to emerge that infects the previously immune and the net effect is millions die?

I don't think you want to be elected Emperor over this at all its a shittier job than you imagine.


Good thing they aren't monopolies, then. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit are are all very popular places for people to post their views. And that's not counting the myriad lesser places like the one we're using now. And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.

I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of association. Should HN be required by law to platform anybody with an "unpopular fringe opinion"? I'd say no. Using government power to force participation in speech someone finds odious is just as bad as using government power to shut down speech.


>And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.

And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit. In the end, almost all communication online runs through a limited set of american megacorps who all act in the same ways, have the same rules and align to the same culture.

It's no surprise China and Russia ban American sites because those sites control the debate and culture of the places that use them.


I do think there is a problem with how tightly some big corporations have locked down social media - but the 1st amendment (and equivalent laws elsewhere) don't cover the requirement that anyone actually listen to your speech.

I think if we see social media as being a necessary modern medium for speech then we're going to need to get a government sponsored something in the mix - whether that is a common required protocol for messaging or a full blown nationalized social network is an open debate we can have. The main issue is that as long as we're blindly trusting the market to fix itself - it has decided the fix is that monopolies are great when nobody is breaking up big tech companies.


> And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit.

I suppose the question is how long that list of websites really is, and how long it needs to be before people stop calling all those websites "monopolies." Obviously it would be fairly absurd to say "no one will read your website unless you can post links on site 1, site 2, site 3, ... site 3,109,550, and therefore those 3.1 million websites are monopolies."


Long enough that they don't co-ordinate, essentially, which would show in how they acted. When facebook, twitter and reddit all announce the same kind of moderation changes within a few months of each other, you can tell that they're a de-facto cartel, and the specifics of how that happens (such as whether they directly communicated with each other) are kind of irrelevant.


I believe there are a LOT of people in the world that would think if your site does not come up in gooogle than it doesn't exist.

I remember reading that there are huge populations in which 'the internet' is facebook - so if fbk censors you - you do not exist.


Also, your site will not come up in google.

Google is just another social network that people are gaming (with the lazy consent of the people who run it.) Even if you make it, you can be wiped off google as easily as off twitter, no matter what your traffic.


I'm more or less in agreement with you on all of those companies except Twitter. Twitter is a notable exception and absolutely does have a monopoly on the social media sector as a "public square" - one which features almost every major politician, journalist, analyst, and activist on the platform, including at times, the US President and many other heads of state. And because of the network effect, this monopoly is unlikely to be challenged in the coming years.

Twitter sought out exactly this kind of political influence, so I'm not sympathetic to any complaints they may have now that they have that influence and are in the spotlight.

In an ideal world, Twitter would have been created as a government site and thus subject to the 1st Amendment, but given that we're not in that world, legislation is needed. I'm willing to concede the other social media companies you cited have competition and/or don't play the central role Twitter plays in the US political process.

Finally, there would be Freedom of Association on Twitter even if it were subject to 1st Amendment rights - no one is forced to follow anyone, and everyone is free to block anyone at all. It should be almost exactly analogous to real-life: you should have the right to associate with whomever you like in our country, but you should not have the right to expel them from the country.


I think a very important reason for Twitter's influence is that it is very easy to include tweets in an article. This saves editorial work. There is no need to paraphrase/extract parts of a longer article and so it mostly avoids the problems around incorrect quotes. It also makes attribution of your sources easier because the tweet is the source itself. Of course, Twitter is a horrible platform for nuanced opinions, but these do not seem to be very popular nowadays.


The First Amendment has always applied to private property "town squares" that are open to public, originally this was decided in the case of indoor shopping malls.


I believe that's incorrect: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individua...

If you're thinking of Pruneyard v Robbins, that only applies in CA. And that wasn't based on the 1st Amendment, but on California's own constitution.


I think/hope there would be raised eyebrows if government agencies set up shop in private malls. Malls have realistic alternatives. Twitter doesn't, even for some government services.


If Twitter's so incredibly powerful and important, why is it worth 5% of Facebook or 2% or Amazon (which owns Twitch) or Google (which owns YouTube)? That doesn't sound like a dominant market position to me.

A large proportion of the people you mention are active on multiple platforms. Some of them aren't active on Twitter at all. Twitter does have a particular market niche, but it's only the 16th most popular platform in terms of global active users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

And freedom of association is a right that Twitter's owners also have. They are not obliged to serve anybody they don't want to.


So, I’m not going to claim if it’s a monopoly or not directly, but just provide new angles on this debate…

Twitter may have an x% of market valuations of other companies… but that doesn’t have to be the only metric we base decisions off of. Amazon is more than twitch, so has a bigger evaluation. But obviously that other business doesn’t compete with Twitter.

Twitter might account for (eg) 25% of phone use time (and say fb accounts for another x%). So maybe we define the market as user attention. That might make more sense than a strictly financial approach.

Or maybe, like the OP said, Twitter has 90% of all political actors on it, when the next platform has only 25%. Or maybe it has 75% of all public political discourse. Maybe defining the market as saturation of politicians. After all, it’s way harder to compete if you have to convince all existing politicians to move.

These metrics are harder to gather, but might be more useful to gauge how dominant Twitter is in the political sphere. When people discuss monopoly, they often don’t care about the (vague and interpreted) laws per se, they actually care about how a company has somehow come to be dominant and influential in a negative way.

Throughout American history, antitrust rules has been used against mostly large businesses that were unpopular (politically and colloquially). Business and society had changed a lot, especially with the internet, so if there is a political push, defining monopoly policies against another target and definition is inevitable.


Sure. Many things are possible. Twitter could be using an embedded hypnotron in their apps to control elite opinion. But when people are talking about effectively nationalizing one company because they don't like its moderation policies, I think we need more than speculation.

And you might not care about why we have antitrust laws or how monopoly impairs free markets. But I sure do.

If somebody wants to make the claim that Twitter has too much power in some way unrelated to monopoly, they're welcome to take a swing at that. But that's a very hard claim to make in that without an actual monopoly, I don't see a plausible mechanism for unfair dominance. Not only is it possible to compete with Twitter, many companies, some of them with vastly more resources, already do. I'd say the rise of TikTok demonstrates there's no particular barrier to entry, and Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.


> Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.

So Gab and Parler should be absolutely free to operate as they wish, in accordance with US laws?

(Because there many folks who like Twitter's moderation who also believe Gab and Parler should be run off the internet, and have tried their best to do so)


I think Gab and Parler should face no legal sanction for hosting content that is legal but awful. But people critical of that also have freedom of speech, and everybody involved has freedom of association. Telling Gab's vendors that maybe they should stop helping Nazis is just as much "in accordance with US laws" as anything on Gab, so I don't see on what grounds you could object to it.


Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace. Twitter doesn't somehow prevent users installing other apps. They aren't a natural monopoly, seeing as how Facebook has been taking shots at that space for years.

This bizarre HN notion that every big company is a "monopoly" needs to die. Being popular doesn't make you a monopoly.


I'm not really arguing from an antitrust perspective. My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly", I'll edit my post. But I'm sure you disagree with my thesis either way.

That said, from an antitrust perspective, there are strong arguments against some social media companies, particularly Facebook. Furthermore, there is a barrier to entry for Twitter: the network effect. It's an incredibly strong barrier.

Finally, of course not every big company is a monopoly.


The network effect is a big barrier until it isn't, and this can happen rather quickly.

Digg. Myspace. Snap. Tumblr. Honestly even Facebook itself; how many young people are opening new accounts on Facebook? For now people have moved onto Instagram but this is the only trick I'm aware of pulled off successfully.


You are not entitled to an audience. A monopoly requires an actual barrier, not a social one: i.e. physically limited space in telecommunication conduits in cities, for example.


And I think you've put your finger on it. A lot of people confuse a right to free speech with a right to be heard. They are BIG MAD that they don't have a god-given right to a large platform. Not that they built the platform and not that they contribute to its upkeep. But they still have strong feelings of entitlement.


> My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly"

What's the concept then, other than that Twitter is doing things that you don't like? That's obviously not a sufficient argument, and if antitrust law isn't the reason for legal action to be taken against them, what's the reason? The only other legal course I could imagine is significant changes to media laws (which I'm certainly not opposed to, but those seem more difficult to argue for than antitrust action), or perhaps going at it from the other side and changing the laws around how public figures must communicate with the public.


A business doesn’t have to be a monopoly per the current legal definition for it to be subject to regulation. We can simply require social media companies to accept all customers. We can make political views a protected class that prevents denial of service at businesses in general. We can treat these tech companies as utilities because they operate the public town square. There are numerous routes for us to fix the current situation, where a small number of employees controlling these companies with billions of users, can become the sole arbiters of can communicate and what they can communicate. It just requires that we start talking about it, educate people about the problem, and build political will.


We probably can't "simply" do that, in that the Constitution is a document with actual meaning.

I would also note that there are existing platforms that effectively make political views a protected class. It turns out they are not very popular, because most people don't want to hang around with people for whom the 14 Words are an important political view.

In practice, a platform can either have haters or the people they hate. Insisting a platform accept all the haters means you're guaranteeing the people they hate will go elsewhere. That's why Twitter has moved away from the sort of policies you favor. As an example, look at when Milo Yiannopoulos led a wave of racist abuse toward Leslie Jones. Twitter had to choose between keeping her (and a lot of her fans and people who just don't like open racism) or Yiannopoulos and his fans.

So the notion that we should override the Bill of Rights to make Twitter platform everybody is not only anti-freedom, but also won't in practice work. If somebody doesn't like Twitter's rules, they should do what you're doing: post somewhere else. There are platforms ready and waiting to take them.


How do you think antitrust laws were created in the first place?


Monopoly is mostly a political definition throughout American history. The policies and laws have been shaped to target businesses not always strictly based on actual market definition in a textbook sense.


> Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace.

There absolutely is. Twitter enjoys an incredible geographic monopoly. The territory just happens to be digital.


1. You're using the technical definition of monopoly in a debatable way to hand-wave away the issue. Each of these companies have excessive market influence.

2. All of these companies are already in bed with the government (e.g. illegal NSA spying). They also try to enact policies that are in agreement with politicians agenda as a bargaining chip to get more favorable legislation and enforcement.


Facebook has 3 billion users. Their efforts in censoring / shaping public opinion / propagandizing are broader and more influential than any government. I don’t want to argue about whose definition of monopoly should win. The fact remains that this is a problem and it needs to be addressed with regulation, just like we regulate power utilities. Social media is just utility communication like anything else we call “telecom”, except with massive barriers to competition due to network effects and no requirement for interoperability.


> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Corporations do not have inalienable rights. Only their human members do. They are chartered by the government, to promote the General Welfare.

If the CEO of YouTube wants to flex her rights, she should do it herself, not behind the veil of a corporation.


Companies do face more constraints than individuals, but the government can't just do whatever it wants. One obvious reason being that companies have owners, and they do have rights.


This argument seems to assume that Internet hosting is like air — a natural resource which by default is available for everyone to use, but social media companies restrict unfairly.

As everyone here should know, it’s not like that: hosting can be awfully expensive, especially for media content. Social media companies receive money from advertisers, and use that money to host content from users and partners that hopefully makes those ads look appealing too. It’s that simple.

Should these companies be compelled by the government to display content that makes their customers (advertisers) look bad? That seems like an awfully deep intrusion into a private business.

If the social media companies truly were monopolies, that would be another thing. But it’s hard to make that argument when new entrants like Snap and TikTok are able to conquer entire market segments and reach $100B valuations in a matter of years.


Real estate is expensive too, but there are "town square" doctrines in some states where presenting yourself as a public space means you must not discriminate on usage.

This goes further -- in some states where such doctrine does not exist it was kind of synthesized because some electoral districts have, say, 80% of the electorate in an apartment building which a judge ruled must be accessible to candidates who run.


A comment section on a blog presents itself as a public space. Does this mean nobody can moderate comments anymore?

Or if the rule only applies to political expression, can spammers just adopt the formula: “I love candidate $X because he buys viagra at http:yyy”

Or, if the rule is that big enough sites suddenly become “town squares”, that seems like a major disincentive to American companies to grow. Others would walk in without these limitations, like Chinese already did with TikTok.


> A comment section on a blog presents itself as a public space. Does this mean nobody can moderate comments anymore?

A blog comment section usually presents itself as a curated space, and the flip side is that blog owners take some level of responsibility for the contents of their comments.

You can be a private club, or you can be a public space. But you can't be both. We make that kind of distinction in the real world too.

> Or if the rule only applies to political expression, can spammers just adopt the formula: “I love candidate $X because he buys viagra at http:yyy”

Of course not, come off it, judges and juries are not actually complete idiots.

> Or, if the rule is that big enough sites suddenly become “town squares”, that seems like a major disincentive to American companies to grow. Others would walk in without these limitations, like Chinese already did with TikTok.

Then ban those sites from the US, like India does. If you can't support US-style freedom of speech then you shouldn't get access to the US market.


A direct analogue is the concept of an easement. If you get large enough and enough people use your site, that is when the public square doctrine would kick in. Similar to how eventually if you let people keep walking through your yard it becomes public use land.

Usually you have multiple chances to fight it. The owner of a square continues to own it because it makes them money.


It’s not about hosting. It’s about distribution and eyeball minutes. As long as social media sites deliver content through an algorithmic feed, there are a limited number of slots available for the “next page.” The user will stop scrolling eventually. Their limited attention is valuable real estate. It’s also why social media has an incentive to maximize the time on feed.

The best regulatory approach to social media is simple: any algorithmic newsfeed must be opt-in. It must default to a chronological option. The default preference must also be applied retroactively for all existing users.


How would you feel if we swapped out "social media sites" and "algorithmic" for "newspapers" and "editorial" in that first paragraph? There are a limited number of slots in the newspaper. Should the government step in a guarantee that the New York Times needs to publish any crackpot theory I come up with?


NYT can also be held liable for things like slander though, right? If social media sites try to claim they are not responsible for any content posted, that does feel a bit like trying to have their cake and eat it too.


I'm not sure the goal here. Do you want increased or decreased moderation? Repealing 230 and making social media companies liable will lead to more moderation and bans not less.


The goal is clear lines of responsibility. If Facebook is responsible for every post, that's ok. If every individual is responsible for their posts, that's also ok. It's when it's blurry that there's a problem.


I'm not the one that was originally asking for regulation on the social media companies, I just think there are too many fundamental differences between current social media sites and newspaper editorials for that analogy to work.

Personally I feel social media sites have taken some of the moderation too far. I don't have a problem (in a legal sense) with the algorithmic feed downweighting various topics or adding links to countering sources or whatever, but I think if these sites don't want to be held liable for content they should error way on the side of allowing individual user pages to be uncensored.

What was even crazier to me was when Twitter blocked DMs containing that Hunter Biden story. The story was suspect obviously, but to moderate private messages like that is a huge overreach IMO.


The Hunter Biden story deserves so much more investigation. It’s a huge story that nobody wanted to touch because it might mean Trump wins again. They went as far as banning even discussion of it. A massive editorial failure that’s going to hurt media’s credibility for a long time.


Would TikTok be illegal under this law? They mostly show content chosen by an algorithm from people you don’t follow.


I agree with you in spirit, though I feel like the issue is more about whether social media are common carriers [1] or publishers.

They shield themselves when they claim to be a carriers, yet act like publishers. The monopoly aspect, I agree, would be more important to speech, given they behave as publishers of what you may as well consider on-spec content.

I'd like to get clear on to what degree they should be considered carriers or publishers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier


They're publishers: they profit from advertising from content, and don't charge a carrier fee. Seems simple enough.


Not all opinions deserve equal airtime. Fringe opinions should have to work harder to get to the mainstream. Isn’t that exactly what happened here? This is the fringe opinion that had the most inherent value and it’s proved that by breaking through. IMO I wish the platforms had censored more bad info than this. It’s crazy to me that there isn’t more friction for bad ideas.


1. Who decides what is a "fringe" theory? You? The Government? The scientific community? Facebook/Twitter etc...?

2. ..Fringe opinions should have to work harder to get to the mainstream... No they shouldn't it is you the reader of those news who should make the decision of how much "brain time" this "fringe" news get.

3. Denying airtime to certain topics doesn't make them go away or sways people that believe them otherwise.


Well, since you asked if I should decide what a fringe theory is, yes, sometimes I do make that decision. But when I'm wrong those things have a habit of breaking through. I remember being pretty skeptical of intermittent fasting for awhile. I'd held it out of a study we did in 2014 and then held it out of our publishing. Something about it smelled like anorexia light. So on the one hand I kept hearing people swear by it and then on the other hand I hadn't done enough research to be comfortable. I ended up having a detailed conversation with a doctor about the physiological side and then with a therapist about eating disorders (especially in men) before I was ready to allow it into our work. So for about a year I was wrongly gatekeeping on this topic. But that's what I mean about fringe ideas need to work harder. The fringes is where those ideas get stress tested and refined. And since ideas break out of the fringes all the time, I don't have any real fear that gatekeeping other places is overly oppressive.


This is some impressive mental gymnastics.

Why was the lab leak claim labeled “fringe” in the first place?

You want Zuckerberg deciding what ideas you should and shouldn’t see?


On the contrary, actors who are bad at judging what qualifies as a "good" idea should be removed from the filtering process.


How is that contrary? MSM got one wrong in the same time that alternative media has gotten hundreds wrong. MSM isn't just better at rejecting misinformation, it's a lot better.


Wrong. The things it does get wrong have more impact. Russiagate is just one prior example. It was patently false from the outset, but led to mass delusions, promotions of fake news propagandists to the point that they are now embedded within and celebrated by the MSM, the discrediting of the media and the intelligence community, breakdown of trust of those institutions by those who had been clear-headed, and fever-dream level hysteria by those who were misled, greatly fracturing Americans who were already divided.

It may be true that they get fewer specific points wrong, but if the ones they do get wrong count for a lot more, that's not better. That's worse.


> Russiagate is just one prior example. It was patently false from the outset

What is "Russiagate"? What about it was "patently false"?

The Mueller investigation got multiple indictments against Russian nationals. They also obtained convictions of people working in the Trump campaign or administration for election-related offenses. They found evidence of Russian attempts to influence voters in swing states by illegally buying ads on social media. That Russia attempted to meddle in the 2016 elections isn't in doubt - only whether the meddling worked.


> What is "Russiagate"?

It's talk-radioese for the Mueller investigation.

> What about it was "patently false"?

IIRC, a lot of misunderstandings about it (e.g. misunderstanding the proven claims that Russia made signficant efforts to interfere with the election as a claim that they successfully rigged it).


This is a very interesting comment for future historians, as it shows how people convince themselves that they have absorbed substance when in fact there is no such substance.

Virtually no aspect of your statement extends beyond press headlines, where the content and follow-on of each of these stories entirely defused the substance of the respective headline. That is why the whole thing that you believe is very important amounted to a pile of dust.


The irony of talking about substance when offering practically none in one's own comment.

> Virtually no aspect of your statement extends beyond press headlines

I didn't realize I was writing an exam with essay-type questions.


This comment would be more valuable if you’d made it in a constructive way with even one detailed example of defused substance.


That's the irony. Their own views don't have any actual substance.


DOJ indicted ham-sandwich Russians, then later retreated. Only process crimes charged (lying, interfering). Buying ads on social media isn't illegal, and the amount was de minimus (< $30k). FARA crimes were reverse-engineered, selectively prosecuted, and didn't related to Russia in any way. Everything about these headlines is an utter farce.


> indicted ham-sandwich Russians, then later retreated.

Citation needed.

> Only process crimes charged (lying, interfering).

Why lie or interfere if you didn't commit any crimes? These aren't random Joes with bad/no legal representation who didn't know what they were doing. You have to assume they were doing it to cover up more serious crimes and assumed they would be pardoned. Which turned out to be true.

> Buying ads on social media isn't illegal

Foreigners buying political ads is illegal. Citizens using money owned by foreigners to buy political ads is also illegal.


>Citation needed. read the docs > Why lie or interfere if you didn't commit any crimes? Fundamental misunderstanding of justice and the US justice system. > buy political ads "political"

Not here to open your eyes for you, but again I appreciate you exposing your perspectives to the light.


It seems you may be unfamiliar with the theoretical and practice application of the legal system. Here is some food for thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1279681

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE


> Fundamental misunderstanding of justice and the US justice system

Because the people committing those crimes didn't know the Fifth Amendment? You don't have to say anything. There's really no reason to lie; other than to cover up something worse. Explain the pardons.


There's also systematic censorship and disinformation against prophylaxis and early treatment information, which could prevent millions of hospitalisations and deaths. [1]

e.g. YouTube recently censored the Ivermectin Global Summit, in which doctors and scientists showed the overwhelming scientific evidence for Ivermectin from around the world. [2]

1. https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/ivermectin/comments/nj9713/ivermect... (video with timestamps and my summary of the key points)


A recently released meta—analysis from the British Medical Journal suggests that the evidence base for ivermectin’s efficacy in treating COVID-19 is low.

https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...


If you'll look carefully, you'll see that's a non peer-reviewed opinion piece.

That's a prime example of disinformation, and indeed the most reputable journals unfortunately play a role in it.

Just to rebut the first thing random thing I saw:

"An important controversial point to consider in any rationale is the 5 µM required concentration to reach the anti-SARS-CoV-2 action of ivermectin observed in vitro,17 which is much higher than 0.28 µM, the maximum reported plasma concentration achieved in vivo with a dose of approximately 1700 µg/kg (about nine times the FDA-approved dosification)"

They are bringing up the in-vitro studies initially done on monkey kidney cells, and then claiming that you'll need such a high dose in a clinical setting. The doses for prophylactic and early treatment are an order of magnitude lower (0.2mg/kg) [1], and in that dose it's safer than paracetamol.

"Ivermectin was generally well tolerated, with no indication of associated CNS toxicity for doses up to 10 times the highest FDA-approved dose of 0.2mg/kg." [2]

In my second link, there's a talk rebutting the in-vitro safety concerns in detail: [3]

There are over 50 studies showing that Ivermectin is effective, and more are coming in every day. [4]

1. https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-mask-pl...

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12362927/

3. https://player.vimeo.com/video/554350476?autoplay=1#t=4702

4. https://c19ivermectin.com/


> That's a prime example of disinformation, and indeed the most reputable journals unfortunately play a role in it.

I'm going to trust an opinion in the BMJ over:

> There are over 50 studies showing that Ivermectin is effective

There have been a vast number of junk studies produced during the pandemic and rolling out 50 of them means very little. How many of them are pre-registered RCTs? How many of them are in low-quality journals?

The BMJ article actually refers to that https://c19ivermectin.com/ site:

"Different websites (such as https://ivmmeta.com/, https://c19ivermectin.com/, https://tratamientotemprano.org/estudios-ivermectina/, among others) have conducted meta-analyses with ivermectin studies, showing unpublished colourful forest plots which rapidly gained public acknowledgement and were disseminated via social media, without following any methodological or report guidelines. These websites do not include protocol registration with methods, search strategies, inclusion criteria, quality assessment of the included studies nor the certainty of the evidence of the pooled estimates. Prospective registration of systematic reviews with or without meta-analysis protocols is a key feature for providing transparency in the review process and ensuring protection against reporting biases, by revealing differences between the methods or outcomes reported in the published review and those planned in the registered protocol."


To be fair the c19ivermectin site only states: Database of all ivermectin COVID-19 studies. If you want a meta-analysis that picks for you the quality studies from that list that's also avilable: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/


> I'm going to trust an opinion in the BMJ over:

If that opinion contains patently false information and assumptions (e.g. early in-vitro study needed a high dose, therefore that same dose must be required in clinical patients), then that opinion is not trustworthy, regardless of whether it's on the BMJ website or not.

See also here [1] under the "Big Science" heading, why the current system is broken.

1. https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea...


Notice how if the same censorship rules were applied here, this entire conversation would be disallowed, and no learning on the topic could take place.


This is kind of doing the same thing that the “fact checkers” are doing. There is indeed a lack of proper studies to validate it. That’s the problem. There are mountains of evidence that show it as very promising and worthy of a proper study. That’s what people are asking for. The FDA keeps saying not to use it, because we don’t know for certain that it works, because we haven’t had any rigorous RCTs to validate it, even though it appears by all accounts to be an extremely valuable tool. They don’t claim that it doesn’t work. They don’t claim that it’s harmful (we know it’s not, it’s been broadly deployed for like 30 years and is known to be far safer than the vaccines, which are already quite safe, at least in the short to medium term). Also, this article is misinformed on the dosage requirement, which has been raised and addressed - looks like sibling comment called this out as well. See, it’s clear who actually follows the science, and who disregards the science but brow beats others with phrases like “follow the science.” Other things known to people following the science? Schools are safe to open and masks don’t do shit outdoors because the probability of infection is < 0.1%. Many of us knew this was the latest science long ago, but again, we weren’t allowed to talk about it, lest someone call us the R word (republican).

To not drop everything and study this aggressively is criminally negligent imo. I believe I read that we have finally decided to fund looking into validating what appears to be strong evidence. But it’s 30 years old, dirt cheap, and not patented. And all of this only came to light well after we sunk billions into vaccines. So, there is not exactly a profit motive or a strong appetite to potentially upend all of that. But if people unwilling to be vaccinated are willing to take that instead, it might be the only hope for herd immunity. Because there is no way we will get there by vaccines alone. Too much of the population are refusing the vaccines.


The FDA doesn't tell people what to research, it tells the public what existing research confirms is safe to use.

If a bunch of scientists think iverwhatever is viable they can do a proper study on it and get it published and peer reviewed.

To "drop everything" would be criminally negligent, there's lots of things that can and should be researched in parallel.


Part of the problem that there is censorship on publishing in the big journals.

That said, there are published RCT showing Ivermectin effectiveness.

In my second link on my first comment, there's a talk about the overwhelming data, censorship and hindrances for publishing.

Sharing evidence on Ivermectin - Dr. Tess Lawrie

https://player.vimeo.com/video/554350476?autoplay=1#t=5756


Effectiveness is not the only criteria that experts need to evaluate for treatments. Ivermectin is fairly easy to overdose on, and people started self-treating prophylactically because it was easy to find from veterinary supply chains.

The majority of available Ivermectin also contained inactive ingredients that had no been safety tested on humans, again because of its primary veterinary uses.

WHO looked at these facts and data from 16 trials that yielded “very low certainty" of efficacy before recommending against its use, but leaving the door open for further research suggesting additional trials were needed.


This is exactly what is being put into discussion. This “very low certainty" doesn't stand against the amount of research that is being released on a daily basis. It's also weird that so many people can selectively blindly trust the WHO on this topic, while at the same time, commenting on how the whole scientific apparatus can be so wrong on a related subject.

Also I'm not buying into this theory that we shouldn't allow an effective treatment, just because someone is supposedly overdosing the veterinary version of the drug. It might be partially true for addicting drugs I suppose, but even in this case, that's why we have doctors and prescriptions.


Ivermectin is at least an order of magnitude safer than paracetamol. There's 30 years of safety data, more than 3.7 billion doses, and on average less than 1 death per year.

In the talk above, the Ivermectin safety profile is specifically discussed here: [1]

"Ivermectin was generally well tolerated, with no indication of associated CNS toxicity for doses up to 10 times the highest FDA-approved dose of 0.2mg/kg." [2]

The only way you can overdose is if you use horse paste, and get the dose wrong by more than an order of magnitude. Even then, it's unlikely to result in hospitalization or death. The only reason people have to use horse paste is because they are unable to safely obtain Ivermectin by other means.

1. https://player.vimeo.com/video/554350476?autoplay=1#t=6300

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12362927/


Is there widespread censorship?

https://ivmmeta.com links to all sorts of studies published on the effectiveness of ivwhatever, all as support for using it.

It sounds more like the rest of the research/medical community is just not convinced.


Yes, indeed. Again, this discussed here:

https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea...

And in video form here:

https://youtu.be/LkIKCbwBcLU?t=702


Yeah I don't buy it. You're moving the goalposts. Censorship is when they prohibit information being distributed. It looks like Government Health Agencies are just not believing the evidence and are therefore not recommending it. They're not saying "don't talk about it" they're not saying "don't research it" they're saying "the evidence so far is inconclusive, we don't recommend treating with it"

That's not censorship.

Just found this overview by NIH on why they don't recommend treament. https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/antiviral-the...

Pretty detailed overview of why they are not convinced. Are they wrong? Maybe, but they're not censoring anything in my books.


> Just found this overview by NIH on why they don't recommend treatment.

What do they recommend? Wait until you're sick enough to go to hospital. This a year in a half into the pandemic, and you don't see the problem?

Compare this to the treatment protocol of the FLCCC

https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-mask-pl...

> Maybe, but they're not censoring anything in my books.

I'd estimate about 90% of social media posts about Ivermectin get censored on social media.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-cancels-the-u-s-senate-...

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/16/craig...

They literally have policies saying if you're posting anything about Ivermectin, it's misinformation, and it will get removed. How is that not censorship?

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785

Just now the Ivermectin Global Summit has been removed from YouTube. A medical conference gets removed and you claim that there's no censorship?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGefHqcnmio

You probably won't believe the censorship until you'll experience it first hand.


You started by claiming

> Part of the problem that there is censorship on publishing in the big journals.

and so far your evidence is censorship by youtube and facebook.


You have to be careful though because we've seen medical journals engage in deceptive practices recently around drugs that could potentially treat COVID. For example, the data showing hydroxychloroquine to be harmful to COVID patients was completely made up or non-existent. Unfortunately, medical academia, in some failed attempt to 'stick to the facts', have led themselves to have a lower a priori assumption of correctness.


Yes. Hydroxychloroquine ultimately turned out to be nothing, but the media and journals did a shameful job covering it. The media made it the latest episode of the Trump show with all that entails, and journals published garbage quickly to back them up. The result is that Trumpers would never believe it didn't work, and the #resistance would never believe it did, no matter what the science would ever say.

It's fine to point at the journals as the definers of what smart people should believe, but can't we say that the Lancet sucks for starting the anti-vax movement by publishing a shit paper by Wakefield, and damaged the integrity of science in general during an epidemic by publishing the hydroxychloroquine trash? Can we point out that they started some of our scariest antiscience trends?


There was a disinformation campaign against Hydroxychloroquine as well. In the failed JAMA study, they administered a nearly toxic dose at late stage patients (when there's no viral replication). This is now being investigated [1].

The largest peer-reviewed study on HCQ (29K patients) showed 70% reduction in death with early treatment. [2]

1. https://www.moneytimes.com.br/heinze-pede-a-pf-que-investigu... (In Portuguese)

2. https://c19hcq.com/mokhtari.html


Insane

How can you be so gung-ho with relatively new vaccines, but bury relatively benign and longer standing interventions?


I mean if a benign intervention doesn't actually work and it causes people to avoid a real intervention that is problematic. There's definitely plenty of alternative medicine misinformation out there that makes similar arguments about safety and history.

That said, it is wrong for YouTube to be removing these videos IMO. First of all, who at YouTube reviewed the material? Do they actually have the expertise necessary to filter out fake claims? There are plenty of natural treatments out there that actually can be helpful, and I doubt YouTube hired a doctor familiar with the relevant literature for its fact checking operation.

Second of all, why is YouTube so fixated on removing COVID-related videos? Is this sort of content about possible preventative measures really more harmful than countless videos that exist on YouTube about natural "cures" for cancer?

And really these are just implementation concerns, there's also potentially more fundamental problems with silencing information like this. I haven't read enough on what the OP posted to comment on how real it may be, but even supposing it were false information, deleting the videos entirely may not be a net positive.


Second of all, why is YouTube so fixated on removing COVID-related videos?

My guess is they're afraid of what happens if/when some anti-anti-vax activist group uses it to justify aggressively regulating Youtube.


> Second of all, why is YouTube so fixated on removing COVID-related videos?

How about lawsuits? People who followed advice on YouTube (or their relatives) could sue YouTube. YouTube already has the technical means to remove video's (e.g. porn), so they will have to defend why they did not do that in this case. There have been a large number of people in the U.S. that died or were infected, so the number of potential litigants is also large.


>why is YouTube so fixated on removing COVID-related videos?

Could it be to protect their advertising revenue interests from the huge Pharmaceutical Industry?


> why is YouTube so fixated on removing COVID-related videos?

It's probably ideological, they literally called themselves "The Good Censor". They think is a right thing to do.



I've had COVID, and this is why I will not get vaccinated, despite CDC recommendations. It's very creepy how they've buried treatments and promoted experimental vaccines.


Why won’t you get a vaccine?


I think GPs point is that if you were optimizing for the best health outcomes, you wouldn't demonize promising, or at least benign, non-vaccine treatments. Doing so makes it seem like the vaccine push is optimizing for something else.


Not GP, but I am not until a vaccine is approved by the FDA for non-emergency use. And even then, I think I will wait for more data to come out about the long-term effects of the vaccines.


One of the criteria for FDA Emergency Use Authorization is that there's no adequate, approved, and available alternatives (https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...) so if they started looking into alternative treatments it could have jeopardized approval of the vaccines.


You'd hope that if there had been promising candidates for prophylactic/therapeutic treatment involving off-patent/generic drugs that the regulator and the medical establishment would have considered them on their merits, and not systematically squashed them with bad studies and half-truths in favor of top-shelf Big Pharma products. It would be unconscionable for people in these positions of authority to have shown partiality towards the pharmaceutical industry in a matter like this which would have delayed access to treatment and which gives rise to serious concerns about patient safety, especially considering the difference in the amount of medium and long-term safety data that is available about them (months compared to decades).


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.

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/


There's a bit of a fuzzy overlap between "man made" and "lab leak".

Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. Certainly the lab was doing research; there's an ongoing debate over what they did, who funded it, whether what they did technically qualifies as "gain of function" research, what practical impact the research could reasonably have been predicted to have, etc.

Still, if your theory is that the lab took a bat virus, performed some research on it such as "serial passaging" to determine if it could mutate to become more infectious to humans, the virus does mutate (thus proving the hypothesis), and then a sample of the mutated virus is accidentally leaked...

...that seems like a plausible theory, and it's now showing up in mainstream discussions; eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca.... But I could easily imagine that being considered a suggestion the virus was "man-made", and censored.


> Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes.

I disagree, the lab leak hypothesis is independent from the lab [inadvertently or deliberately] mutating the virus. The lab may have merely possessed the virus, having made only the mistake of transporting the virus from a remote region into the middle of a city and then subsequently losing control of it.


That would help explain how the virus got from the mine to Wuhan; it does not help explain how the virus mutated from a bat virus unable to infect humans to a virus that was extremely good at infecting humans with, so far, no intermediate stages identified.

Much of the problem with the zoonotic explanation is that no evidence of the process has been found. Was a third virus involved? We haven't identified it. Was a third host species involved? We haven't identified one. Were there any half-way variants that were slightly capable of infecting humans, and then mutated further to reach their final form? We haven't identified any. There was some initial speculation about the wet market, but that hasn't panned out. Pangolins were briefly considered as a possible intermediate host, but I think that's also been ruled out.

So if the lab collected the virus, flew it to Wuhan, stored it, and then accidentally leaked it in its original form, we still have no idea what happened next. It's a bat virus, so it infected a local Wuhan bat, and then what? And whatever the theory is, why have we been unable to find any evidence of it so far?

Assuming RaTG13 was indeed the source of COVID-19, the question of "how it got to Wuhan" is, I think, much less interesting than "how did it mutate into COVID-19" (and "why can't we find evidence of that process?"). And I think when people talk about "lab leak" versus "zoonotic", they're generally focused on the latter questions.


I generally agree with you, my guess is the virus was messed with and accidentally got out. However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios, such as:

1) The sample the lab received was from the 'third host' and not from a bat; e.g. a field researcher mailed the lab a slice of pangolin.

2) A guano miner or lab researcher received a massive viral dose and inadvertently became a one-man walking "GoF lab"

> Assuming RaTG13 was indeed the source of COVID-19, the question of "how it got to Wuhan" is, I think, much less interesting than "how did it mutate into COVID-19" (and "why can't we find evidence of that process?").

'Interesting' is subjective, but I think both questions are important. Particularly, the wisdom of locating a lab like this inside a city should probably be called into question. Whether the lab was doing GoF research on this virus prior to outbreak is certainly an important question; arguably the more important of the two. But unless we are dealing with 'zero-sum importance', that does not diminish the importance of figuring out why and how the virus was transported into a city.


> However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios

I haven't suggested we should, not do I think that would be wise. We're in the uncomfortable position of having effectively no evidence in favour of any theory of COVID-19s origin, so we're reduced to trying to imagine which bits of missing evidence are the least likely to have been missed.

It seems true that Wuhan is outside the flight range of the horseshoe bats living in the mine, and that a sample of RaTG13 was brought from the mine to the lab in Wuhan. If RaTG13 was a direct predecessor of COVID-19 (likely), and if the lab in Wuhan was the direct source of the initial infections in Wuhan (hard to estimate), then I think Occam's Razor suggests we have a good enough explanation for how RaTG13 got to Wuhan. It would be a remarkable coincidence if a sample of RaTG13 was in Wuhan to be studied, then RaTG13 independently mutated into an unknown COVID-19 precursor outside of Wuhan, then the precursor was separately brought to Wuhan to be studied, then the precursor leaked and became COVID-19!

...but as ever with this mess, I don't know of a reason we could rule it out. At most we can try and estimate the odds of the lab having a closer precursor than RaTG13 but not realising or, if they realised it, not admitting it, but I'm not sure how to even start evaluating that scenario, so...


We haven't found any evidence about what happened in the lab...because China barred WHO researchers from visiting the lab do look for that evidence.


"China barred WHO researchers"...

and the WHO researchers themselves engage in (and fund) the same type of experiments as the Wuhan lab (and the Wuhan lab itself), and so had very little incentive to investigate or implicate themselves either...

and further, there actually is evidence of what went on in the Wuhan lab, see https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...


So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection.

Biological materials are hard to grow and store. Very few people have ever been infected from handling corpses from much more pathogenic viruses (i.e. the black death was one of the only significant ones, and that's because it's a bacterium). And that's about 70kg and trillions of bacteria to "maybe" end up contaminated.

In-vitro scale research on viruses has been going on for a long time, in BSL2 facilities (your university bio-labs for students probably met this standard), and people getting infected from much more contagious human-viruses in those settings just doesn't happen.

The scale of difference in quantity between a smear of virus particles on a petridish (pretty much immobilized, and, as we know, at serious risk of being destroyed by the trace UV from fluorescent lighting) and the quantity from an active infection in a human cough is multiple orders of magnitude (also a massive difference in exposure path: COVID spreads principally by going in through mucus membranes as aersolized droplets - dead tissue doesn't produce these, neither do immobilized particles).

No one pushing "lab leak" has ever proposed a mechanism by which it happened - they just assume it can, because they don't work in a biology lab and have no idea about what biological research actually looks like.


> So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection.

I reject that. Lab leaks have been known to occur, with human casualties:

> "After the outbreak of SARS in 2003, labs around the world began studying the virus, which had come perilously close to causing a global pandemic. Since that time, there have been no less than six lab leaks of SARS. The first took place in at the National University of Singapore, where a graduate student contracted the disease from a contaminated sample. This was followed by an incident in Taiwan, when a researcher contracted it, most likely during a botched decontamination of laboratory waste. Then several leaks took place at China’s National Institute of Virology. In one case, a researcher passed the infection to her mother, who died of SARS. In each case, human error, most likely exacerbated by inadequate safety protocols, accounted for the leaks."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/covid-...


Safety incidents happen a lot.

> By 1960, hundreds of American scientists and technicians had been hospitalized, victims of the diseases they were trying to weaponize. Charles Armstrong, of the National Institutes of Health, one of the consulting founders of the American germ-warfare program, investigated Q fever three times, and all three times, scientists and staffers got sick. In the anthrax pilot plant at Camp Detrick, Maryland, in 1951, a microbiologist, attempting to perfect the “foaming process” of high-volume production, developed a fever and died. In 1964, veterinary worker Albert Nickel fell ill after being bitten by a lab animal. His wife wasn’t told that he had Machupo virus, or Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. “I watched him die through a little window to his quarantine room at the Detrick infirmary,” she said.

> In 1977, a worldwide epidemic of influenza A began in Russia and China; it was eventually traced to a sample of an American strain of flu preserved in a laboratory freezer since 1950. In 1978, a hybrid strain of smallpox killed a medical photographer at a lab in Birmingham, England; in 2007, live foot-and-mouth disease leaked from a faulty drainpipe at the Institute for Animal Health in Surrey. In the U.S., “more than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bacteria, viruses and toxins that pose significant or bioterror risks to people and agriculture were reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012,” reported USA Today in an exposé published in 2014. In 2015, the Department of Defense discovered that workers at a germ-warfare testing center in Utah had mistakenly sent close to 200 shipments of live anthrax to laboratories throughout the United States and also to Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and several other countries over the past 12 years. In 2019, laboratories at Fort Detrick — where “defensive” research involves the creation of potential pathogens to defend against — were shut down for several months by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for “breaches of containment.” They reopened in December 2019.

From https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca..., many links to sources and more details in the original. The USA Today story is particularly interesting though (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/report...).

Humans make mistakes. Accidents happen. And even at the most secure labs in the US, sometimes people die. Yes, we (hopefully) learn from our mistakes; a fatal accident in the 50s or 60s doesn't mean these things still happen today. Maybe (hopefully!) all those recent breaches and safety incidents were relatively minor. Perhaps China is much better about such things than other nations. And even if mistakes can happen that doesn't mean a mistake happened here, in this instance!

But if your prior is just "BSL-2 and higher labs are safe, they would never have a containment failure" I think you may want to re-evaluate it.


Your first example there is literally an attempt to mass produce live virus for biological weapons, with human infectious viruses. As are most of your examples. This all changes if the literal goal of research is "mass produce liters of viable virus".

But viral research in general doesn't do that, because it's a huge hazard, and unnecessary (and expensive, labor intensive etc.)

What I am drawing contention on is what physically would have to happen for a lab leak to occur (and the other side problem: if it's a natural borne virus already capable of human infectivity...then it was already in the wild).

Take the 1977 issue: the suspicion is not that it was an accident with a preserved sample. The suspicion is that the Russians were actively growing up the virus (a human infectious virus) - for some type of work, probably a vaccine trial.

So we've got two basic problems: why would the Wuhan lab be growing up large quantities of this specific virus (and is there evidence they were?)...and if it was already human infectious though, why is it more likely it escaped the lab, when such a thing would already have to be in the wild to have been recovered?

There'd be no reason, having discovered COVID-19, to start growing up the virus before it had been sequenced. And there'd be no reason, without already knowing what it does, to not publish a paper describing the act of isolating and sequencing a new coronavirus, which is the type of research the Wuhan lab put out all the time. Researcher's operate on publish or perish, and Chinese researchers publish everything they can.


Those are good questions, but I think the link I provided gives some decent potential answers.

I don't know, and I'm not asserting, that any of this is true. But given what is known about the types of research being done, this doesn't seem like something we can rule out either.

For one example, the article quotes Shi Zhengli, a lab director at the Wuhan Virology Institute, who had been doing research on RaTG13, and who upon realising COVID-19 was related to RaTG13 was immediately was concerned it had leaked from her lab. According to the article, she lost sleep over this, and was enormously relieved when she could prove that the outbreak in Wuhan was not any strain that the lab had a record of storing.

I find it surprising that you are so much more convinced than a lab director of the lab in question that no such leak was possible. To be sure, perhaps she was suffering from an excess of caution...but if she found the thought plausible enough that she lost sleep over it, perhaps we, vastly further away and with much less information, should not rule the risk out entirely?

In any case, if you feel comfortable, based on your knowledge, concluding that you can rule out the lab leak hypothesis, that's great, but it does seem to put you at odds with basically every expert I've seen quoted so far.


> I find it surprising that you are so much more convinced than a lab director of the lab in question that no such leak was possible.

> when she could prove that the outbreak in Wuhan was not any strain that the lab had a record of storing.

You answered your own question. That's the point here: the evidence does not point to a lab leak.


So the director of one lab, hearing about COVID-19, apparently went "oh shit, that could have come from MY lab!" Later, she publicly announced that it's fine, it didn't come from her lab after all, then the lab was shut down, all records suppressed, and China has prevented any independent investigation.

Even if we take this at face value, and the denials were fully truthful, this tells us that:

1) it didn't leak in that form from that specific lab (of the several operating at the Virology Institute), assuming they had good record keeping. But it might have leaked from a different lab, or it might have leaked from her lab and then mutated prior to being discovered. (And, while it might seem unlikely that it mutated without any trace of intermediate forms being found, that's the exact assumption the zoonotic theory already requires...)

2) Someone in a position to know believed that a leak was plausible based on her knowledge of the types of research being performed, the quantities of material they had on hand, the safety protocols they were following, etc.

I suppose I just find that less reassuring than you do. :)


SARS 1, which is far less infectious, escaped from labs multiple times.


> Biological materials are hard to grow and store. In general, many diseases are highly species specific and/or affect only certain cell types. When you don't have a suitable cell line, the only real option is to keep live hosts. But these hosts could cross-contaminate other species/cell lines within the lab facility. Bat physiology is very different from most other mammals. If you want to study viruses in bats, it makes sense to use real animals, because you can be certain that the virus replicates in vivo, but it can be difficult to find a good in vitro environment.


The whole purpose of the lab was to grow and study these viruses, and to promote their growth in order to study how they might grow. Hard to understand how they would not have had enough virus, as you say.


Indeed, a lab leak includes all of these possible priors of how the virus ended up in the lab in the first place.

But the only serious contender for the prior hypothesis is that the researchers produced a highly infectious chimeric coronavirus through gain-of-function/serial passage.


At least one researcher who has worked with the head of the Wuhan lab has accused her of shoddy adherence to safety practices, so it's also quite possible that simple negligence led to cross-contamination and subsequently to human exposure.

It would certainly explain how the predecessor candidates simultaneously acquired all of the necessary mutations: all of the most genetically similar coronaviruses were all being studied in the lab; if precautions were not taken to avoid cross-contamination then they could picked up the mutations in a relatively benign environment without external stressors. (One of the initial reasons given for the man-made theory was due to the fact that COVID19 was unlikely to arise naturally in the wild because any combination of mutations among the predecessor strains short of the entire package of mutations that ended up in COVID19 would have resulted in a strain less able to reproduce than existing competing strains.)

Similarly, lax attention to safety practices would also explain why the first known cluster of COVID19 cases occurred among Wuhan lab workers.


Stored in what form.

A lab having a bunch of samples in a refrigerator doesn't mean that a spill causes them all to spontaneously recombinate.


while you are correct that lab-leak is "theoretically" a distinct hypothesis, in this specific case the apparent splicing of pangolin virus parts together with bat virus parts is a highly suggestive smoking gun for man-made, especially when you consider that this lab does splicing experiments


From what I understand, this lab and those like it likely have/had a large backlog of samples they had received from field researchers but had not yet had an opportunity to identify, sequence, or otherwise mess around with. A procedural error in handling a sample in that backlog could have occurred, at least in theory.


What’s the difference? I suppose it is possible that the Wuhan bat hunters found this virus occurring naturally and just, you know, kept it around without telling anyone...


There is a huge difference! For one, suggesting it was man-made lends credibility to the conspiracy theory crowd ("plandemic", "they manufactured it to enslave you", etc), which is probably why the press over-indexed on debunking it. Also, it could imply that there was some intent behind it appearing when and where it did, when there may have been none (Hanlon's razor applies until a proof to the contrary appears). My understanding was that the theory that the virus was man-made was debunked, but I have not been paying much attention to what was happening to the stories saying it may have been an accidental leak from a lab, and given China's record, I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that there was research happening on it, it got out, and that was then covered up.


If the virus was man-made, then its release was either accidental or deliberate. Both of these possibilites need to be allowed until disproven. If it was deliberate, then why?


It'd be pretty stupid for them to deliberately release it right next to the lab.


This seems obvious. I don't think it was deliberate. But whether deliberate or not, the virus achieved many policy goals for the ccp.

Firstly it got rid of Trump who was before covid in charge of one of the best economies in the USA and would have had an easy path to reelection. The virus was a black swan event that caused that to go away and trump.to make several mistakes. It also got joe biden elected which we know the CCP preferred.

Secondly, it embarrassed america on the world stage while china came away initially looking very good. China's centralized government came out looking better than the chaotic american way. This helps China's foreign investment image. Wouldn't you rather do business with stable countries?

Finally, of all countries, china had the best economic outcome. It's economy was never totally shut. They continued to profit from masks and other PPE.

Basically, the virus was a clear win for the ccp.

Personally my belief is that whether the virus is natural, a leak, or a man made weapon, once it was out, the ccp clearly weaponized the pandemic to effectively achieve several policy goals.


> Firstly it got rid of Trump who was before covid in charge of one of the best economies in the USA and would have had an easy path to reelection. The virus was a black swan event that caused that to go away and trump.to make several mistakes. It also got joe biden elected which we know the CCP preferred.

This sounds super far fetched. When Covid began to spread the democratic candidate wasn't chosen yet and this theory completely relies on the Trump administration to completely screw up in the eyes of the public. I don't have a high opinion of Trump, but the US government is a lot larger than him.

And then if they're caught it turns the entire planet against them. It sounds like a massive risk just to get rid of a somewhat annoying president 4 years early, it's not like he was threatening war or anything like that.


There’s only a spec of difference. I don’t know anyone suggesting that the lab leak was of a natural origin. The theory is that the lab created the virus and it leaked.


I think there’s some nuance here. The virus could have a perfectly natural origin in bats, but not be able to infect humans in its original form. There are many ways the virus could have come to infect humans, such as by manipulating it directly, via gain of function research, or even just by a random mutation that managed to infect a lab worker (seems unlikely since it’s alleged there may have needed to be an intermediate species). Whether you could consider the virus “lab created” or “man-made” at that point is maybe a matter of debate. Even the Guardian article on Facebook’s policy changes seemed to conflate these scenarios, so I’m not entirely sure what the changes were.

But they’re all a far cry from the more extreme narrative of “this was deliberately engineered to infect humans and/or as a bioweapon”, which is not what is being suggested here (nor, it seems, was that ever what Tom Cotton suggested).


I know I got downvotes already but I guess that’s what I meant, that in a lab setting human researchers would have been manipulating the virus. I meant that I don’t think anyone is saying that researchers captured a novel COVID variant in nature and just held it in a lab until it leaked.

If the lab theory holds any water, it’s almost certain that humans were manipulating the virus in some form.

That’s why I don’t see much of a distinction between a lab leak theory and a human-made or human-manipulated virus.


Well, I report the opposite. I guess the data is useless.


I think there's a genuine spectrum between man-made bio-weapon (not very believable IMO), through gain of function research (I've read enough that - if true - the RNA evidence suggests that it probably wasn't this), through to leak from animal studies.

Gain of function, if it isn't ruled out by RNA or other approaches, isn't quite man-made and is at least somewhat plausible. Gain of function research on the flu is (as I understand it) how the flu vaccine is created ahead of the season.

https://jme.bmj.com/content/41/11/901

Evans NG, Lipsitch M, Levinson M The ethics of biosafety considerations in gain-of-function research resulting in the creation of potential pandemic pathogens

Journal of Medical Ethics 2015;41:901-908.

This paper proposes an ethical framework for evaluating biosafety risks of gain-of-function (GOF) experiments that create novel strains of influenza expected to be virulent and transmissible in humans, so-called potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs). Such research raises ethical concerns because of the risk that accidental release from a laboratory could lead to extensive or even global spread of a virulent pathogen.


Some techniques of manipulating the virus would leave "fingerprints". Others would not. My understanding is that the sweeping assertions that COVID-19 would show clear signs of being manipulated have been largely debunked. Many ultimately traced back to a letter written by a group of virologists led by Kristian Andersen and published in Nature, but all that letter did was assert that some techniques (not all!) were unlikely (but even then, not impossible).

I'm unaware of any reputable experts who are willing to assert that manipulation via, eg, serial passaging, can be ruled out. The closest you'll get is assertions that a natural zoonotic origin is, in their estimation, more likely.

See, eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca... and https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th....


I'm generally in favour of the actions taken against misinformation but this situation surprises me. Lab leak always seemed plausible and non-crazy even if you think the odds are against it.

I don't envy the task of making a call on any of this stuff.


If we accept that taking action against misinformation is good, then this sort of mistake will inevitably happen.

If you're in favor of taking action against misinformation, then you should be willing to accept this situation as an acceptable failure. I'm not willing to accept that.


I believe that censorship is more harmful than misinformation.

Censorship is a bottom down initiative. It requires a few bad actors or 'mistakes' to completely change the information landscape. Misinformation is bottom up. It still needs to compete with a whole bunch of other ideas and it requires far more effort to spread. You also don't create a pretence that all available information is correct.

Censorship carries far larger risks, with small short term gains. It's like picking pennies in front of steamroller.


Except this in an example of the exact opposite of what you describe. As the misinformation was coming from the top and the censorship requests were coming from the bottom.

The reason this question became politicized and labelled as misinformation is that politicians started spreading this rumor for purely political purposes rather than based on scientific evidence. It is hard to imagine misinformation being more top down than senators, cabinet members, and even the President spreading it. The fact they may end up being right in the end doesn't mean they were acting in good faith at the time.

The reason this was censored was because there was bottom up support for it to be censored. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have repeatedly shown that their preference is for less moderation rather than more. Moderation costs them money and they don't want to spend money. The reason they increase moderation is because their users demand it.


> Misinformation is bottom up. It still needs to compete with a whole bunch of other ideas and it requires far more effort to spread

Lmao no, the truth needs effort to spread. Because the truth is usually boring and lame.

Lies, misinformation, conspiracy theories are juicy. They make the reader feel smart - either by confirming their biases, or giving them the feeling of being "in" on something that's not widely known. People love being the first to pass on some hot goss to their group.


Except it was never misinformation. It's always been not only plausible, but the null hypothesis given the location of the lab, the nature of research there, and the early cases along the train line.

When Jack banned zerohedge for their article, there were other reasons than "misinformation". Only he and his masters know those reasons.


> Except it was never misinformation

This sort of illustrates the problem here. It was plausible to you but what you think doesn't matter if the powers that be decide it's misinformation. You can't just come by after the fact and say "it was always obviously not misinformation" to dismiss the fact that anti-misinformation controls failed here, in a way that ultimately suppressed reasonable speech.

My opinion: in the grand scheme of things this comes down to just letting people express things online, even if they are outlandish or ridiculous or whatever. Letting people speak their mind without being censored even when I don't agree with them ensures that I get to speak my mind without getting censored when I'm in the minority, which is a right I value.


That's not what "null hypothesis" means.

The null hypothesis in this case is certainly animal origin. The idea of a null hypothesis is to identify what the data would look like if they are purely due to chance, if there's no intervening effect to be discovered.

In fact this is part of what makes the lab leak hypothesis weak: it'll be difficult to rule out the null hypothesis without fairly direct evidence of a lab leak, and the lab leak has low probability for many reasons, not least of which is that it's a low probability occurrence in general.

The whole idea is just an excuse for people to larp as CIA analysts.


Exactly, the misinformation argument is a red herring. The evidence for the lab leak theory was assembled and publicly available by February of last year. It has not changed in the intervening 15 months. The only explanation I can come up with is TDS—otherwise intelligent people (including some of my close friends) who simply could not consider an idea supported by Trump to be credible. Didn’t matter how clear and convincing the evidence was, they just assumed that it must be faulty and untrustworthy.


Who would've thought that letting billionaires with international business interests censor scientific inquiry would end badly...


It's really hard to view this as suppressing scientific inquiry. Scientists don't use public Facebook posts to collaborate on their research, nor to share their final results with the rest of the scientific community. It's also very hard to picture social media giants ever blocking users from posting anything that comes from peer-reviewed published science.


> If you're in favor of taking action against misinformation, then you should be willing to accept this situation as an acceptable failure.

We can believe taking action against misinformation is a generally good principle while still believing that both our definition of "misinformation" and the kinds of actions we take may need to be improved.


I disagree. The market and political forces are too strong, the "misinformation" umbrella will always expand to fit the needs of the wealthy and powerful.

When the stakes are high, exactly the time when you need radical honesty, the benefits of censoring information are also high.

Some might say, "hasn't this always been the case?" And you'd be correct. The difference today is that it is now a fashionable political position to cheer for censorship of any controversial ideas. This prevailing attitude combined with centralization of the public square (social media) is a dangerous combination, and we will continue to pay the price of this well into the future.

The trust in traditional institutions is plummeting, as it should for anyone who has witnessed their actions the past year.

I still remember the "hug a Chinese person" campaign in Italy.


You still have to be willing to accept that whatever actions you take against misinformation will occasionally be taken against things that are actually true.

That also means that over time, the credibility of the entities that flag 'misinformation' will inevitably erode: as more people are exposed to things they know, perhaps first-hand, are true, but are flagged as 'misinformation'.


Yeah this is how I came to be more skeptical of MSM and Gov't authorities. I think by the time one hits ~30-40 most people have probably been through enough news cycles and been the subject of or close enough to some newsworthy event to have an inside look of the accuracy/fairness of the process and it's probably why older people tend to be more conservative cynical.


The perfect is the enemy of the good?


Less misinformation than disinformation, if you look at Daszak's aggressive attempts to control the media narrative (see Lancet article for instance)


That assumes a binary situation, but it can be a sliding scale.

A system that prevents only Holocaust denial and flat earth theories is unlikely to ban anything that is actually true.


The current situation was justified with examples like yours.

A year ago, most people in favor of banning misinformation would have classed the lab leak hypothesis in the same obviously-false bucket with your examples.


Slippery slope fallacy?


Even “Holocaust denial” exists on a spectrum.


This is a good example of why opponents to actions against misinformation oppose it. Nobody should make these calls because the wrong call will be made eventually, and the power to silently mediate and manipulate discourse is very tempting.


>I'm generally in favour of the actions taken against misinformation...

Who would be the one to determine what is misinformation and what is not?


About 15 billionaires and six corporations who own most US media outlets.


The evidence?


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?


> Who should evaluate the evidence for its credibility?

Why the Ministry of Truth of course


I don’t have an answer to that but it most certainly should NOT be New York Times, Business Insider, WAPO, FactCheckXYZ, etc style publications.


Wait. You've just excluded a bunch of stuff without even hinting what you're in favour of. For all we know, you might think it should be Alex Jones.

Don't do this. It's hand-waving and people can read all kinds of things into it.


"Evidence" is not a person, and can't make decisions. Decisions are made by people, who we hope are informed by evidence. Who are these people and how are they chosen? What mechanisms exist to evaluate their effectiveness and recall them when they fail? These questions are currently being answered by American corporations, which is not confidence inspiring.


>Decisions are made by people, who we hope are informed by evidence.

That hope is lost. It's really easy to get overwhelmed in how doomed we seemed to be because of it. People are believing things in spite of evidence, and are absolutely rooted in that belief to society's detrement. How much further could be be if beliefs were no longer held onto once evidence were present that shows that belief to just not be correct? Sadly, I don't think we will ever know.


Some people will believe stupid things no matter the evidence until the day they die. I don't consider this such a severe problem as to warrant putting some people in charge of what others should believe. Just the contrary in fact...


Not just some people—everyone.


Quite right, myself not least of all.


Speculation and conjecture is not always evident, but is many times useful in determining the evidence. But this type of discussion was axed from many forums as "misinformation".


Frankly the odds of a lab leak are much greater than a bat virus from a thousand miles away jumping across two species in a the Wuhan market.


This is a good example of why I don't say things like I'm "generally in favour of actions taking against misinformation."

We shouldn't take any action, at least at a governmental level. And certainly not on the level of a big corporation like Facebook.

It's very embarrassing that Facebook and YouTube banned this.


It’s misinformation until we tell you otherwise citizen!


If your pursuing a misinformation campaign it does make since to occasionally publish some facts. That way people can wring their hands if they should ban you or not, and so your supporters have something to say that you were right about.


I'm not sure whether it's plausible to non-experts like you or me is a valuable way to categorize it. But the reason to be cautious about it is the potential for violence. Both at an individual level against people perceived as Asian and at a global level of a hot war. A good example here is after 9/11. The US had a rash of violence against people who people thought looked Muslim, like the Sikh gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi [1]. We ended up invading not just Afghanistan but Iraq and we still haven't brought all the troops home.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi


You are making very very wrong suggestion now. Because some people can link Chinese government to all Asians, so we can't criticize the Chinese government? Because Chinese government = Chinese people = Chinese Americans = Asian Americans?

I think this kind of automatic linking Chinese government to Chinese / Asian Americans is itself racist.

What you are suggesting is implicitly accepting this racist idea.

To stand against this kind of racist idea, what we should do is to explicitly separate the Chinese government from Chinese people, from Chinese Americans. We should directly call out Xi Jingping the dictator and CCP the dictatorial regime, instead of implying Xi Jingping and CCP own Chinese people and somehow also own Chinese / Asian Americans.


We can criticize the Chinese government. But if we do we should have facts, not wild speculations.

I agree automatically linking Asian-looking people to the actions of China's government is racist. And there are a lot of racists out there. Given the ongoing spike in anti-Asian hate crimes [1] and online anti-Asian hate tied specifically to coronavirus [2] I think we should be unusually careful about excited speculation.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-c...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/09/twitter...


I don't understand your logic. Are you saying if the lab leak theory is proved to be true, then the racists turn out to be more justified racists? The rightful racists? If the lab leak theory is proved to be false, then the racists turn out to be less justified racists? The wrongful racists?

How does criticizing the Chinese government has anything to do with racism? Because we can't give racists ideas to be racists, so we should restrict ourselves in criticizing the authoritarian (actually also racist) regime? Your logic is strangely twisted.


I am not saying any of those things. I am saying that because fact-free speculation about Chinese responsibility for something many were already calling the "china virus" could drive mob violence against Asians, we should be especially careful about it.


It's called China virus bc it's originated from China. It has nothing to do whether it's lab leak or not at all.


That is not exactly why people are using terms like "china virus" and "kung flu".


The first article you linked states that between 2019-2020 hate crimes against Asians increased dramatically in New York and Los Angeles: from 3 to 28 in the former and from 7 to 15 in the latter.

I think that characterizing this fact as an “ongoing spike in anti-Asian hate crimes” is a breathtakingly broad generalization.


Ok? I don't think it's my job to provide internet randos with infinite links until they're satisfied. If you want more information, feel free to Google. But along the way try to notice whether you proof standard is this high for everything you read, or just when somebody points out racism in action.


> Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory.

Can we define/refine the concept of "lab-leak theory" a bit? Because some of the stuff floating around a year ago was a bit unhinged from reality:

> You’ve probably heard the rumor: The new coronavirus is a bioweapon. Some malicious country—perhaps the United States, maybe China, depending on who’s talking or tweeting—purposefully unleashed the virus that causes Covid-19 on the world.

* https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/why-do-politicians-keep-brea...

> Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that’s been promoted or endorsed by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran’s supreme leader, and others.

> But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.

* https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronav...

"In the Shadow of Biological Warfare: Conspiracy Theories on the Origins of COVID-19 and Enhancing Global Governance of Biosafety as a Matter of Urgency":

> Two theories on the origins of COVID-19 have been widely circulating in China and the West respectively, one blaming the United States and the other a highest-level biocontainment laboratory in Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the pandemic. Both theories make claims of biological warfare attempts. According to the available scientific evidence, these claims are groundless.

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7445685/


This is classic “nurse vs. feminist nurse” cognitive distortion. Whether the virus was developed as a bio weapon, or simply as a product of well-intentioned gain-of-function research, is irrelevant to the factual basis of whether or not it escaped from the lab. We don’t need to establish how and why it was created, only that it was, in order to assess the likelihood of lab release as a root cause of the pandemic.


That's nice in theory, but a couple of things. First of all, there was a complete lack of actual evidence that there was a lab leak (this is also true of the Wuhan market hypothesis, it was all quite circumstantial) but we have seen similar viruses arise naturally in the past so our priors would favor the market hypothesis over the lab leak. Second, the lab leak hypothesis and the intent of the virus were tightly entangled in the original reports, especially from the US Administration, that is that China created the virus to harm the US. Third, intent absolutely matters. If this is a bio-weapon that was designed to be used in an attack, then the consequences of such actions are vastly different then if this was a naturally occurring virus that was collected in bats that happened jump to a human host and escaped the lab.

While I increasingly believe that the lab leak hypothesis may be the true origin, my priors still favor a natural jump at this point.

These are also not the only two possible scenarios, just demonstrating that there are different consequences for different intentions, it is literally why the US Penal code has Murder (1,2,...) and Manslaughter (...) as well as Self-Defense protections built into it.


> Whether the virus was developed as a bio weapon, or simply as a product of well-intentioned gain-of-function research, is irrelevant

I for one think it is very important to establish if it was the product of bioweapon program (or not).


Exactly what many were warning about with big tech censorship and getting vilified for it. But it's good if it fails quickly and conclusively, instead of taking years to get to that point.


That’s a good point. At least the censorship failed quickly and completely. It’s clear it was the wrong thing to do.


Google also pinned the first result for any query about the WIV to an article claiming that there was no way whatsoever the virus came from there.


That’s awful, I hope they are thoroughly embarrassed.


Google have been manipulating search results for years, putting their fingers on the scale both in terms of censorship and boosting of results.

When you control weights behind search results and news articles, you quite literally control the flow of information.

Google is an actively malicious company, and this was not done with good intentions. Anti-science rhetoric by Dr Fauci, the WHO and the mainstream media establishment was never based on any evidence other than politicized opinion.

Dr Fauci was vehemently against closing the border with China in January 2020. He was vehemently against masks. He was vehemently against lab leak theory (calling it "impossible"). He falsely claimed the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not doing gain-of-function research.

These are malicious acts which have a real cost. The cost is human life. How many additional people died on the back of his anti-mask rhetoric in March?


Remember - people were called fascists + racists for mentioning or discussing the lab leak theory.


Remember, the discussion of the lab leak theory is strongly correlated with a rise in hate crimes against Asian-Americans. There were also lots of links made between the lab leak theory and needing to tighten immigration policies to keep out "undesirables".


> Remember, the discussion of the lab leak theory is strongly correlated with a rise in hate crimes against Asian-Americans

By black people, the group least likely to be part of the party whose leader's immigration policy you decry, and who have always had anti-asian sentiment after the LA riots.


Are we sure that was the lab leak theory, and not just the emergence of a novel pandemic disease in China? The kind of people who attack random Asians in the street don't need a lab leak to justify it: they just need the fact that the virus spread outward from Wuhan.


How many hate crimes have been committed? There have been 3.5 million COVID-19 deaths officially. Sorry but the truth is more important. Hate crimes are already illegal.


So?



The theory that "SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab" overlaps some with the theory that "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made", but they're not the same thing. According to the article Facebook's policy change is towards posts saying "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made". Did Facebook's policy ban posts which supported the "lab leak" theory but didn't claim the virus was "man-made"?

Facebook's April 2020 covid-19 policy notice only mentions "man-made". https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/


It's important to be clear: they don't overlap at all.

They are objectively independent arguments.

If they overlapped you couldn't say this: "SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab" and "SARS-CoV2 was not man-made". But you can.


It's not clear to me what you mean by "they don't overlap at all". If I create a truth table for the two binary possibilities of 'leaked?' and 'created?', I get something like this:

    Created, Leaked:  It was created in a lab, and accidentally got out.
    Not Created, Leaked: It was being studied in a lab, and accidentally got out.
    Created, Not Leaked: It was created in a lab and deliberately released (the biowarfare hypothesis.)
    Not Created, Not Leaked: The lab had nothing to do with it at all (the wet market hypothesis.)

Created/leaked are independent, but since both or either could be true or false, there seems to be 'overlap.'


It’s all about the narrative, comrade. That their enforcement is so incredibly in sync is where more scandal resides.


And a reminder that the majority of HN supported them in doing that because we needed to "fight disinformation".


Twitter users got banned in early February 2020 because they were sharing images and videos from locked-down Wuhan that were deemed as inappropriate.

I know that my main information source on the virus back at the time was a Chinese lady expat living in the States who was writing for Epoch Times, not the most credible source generally speaking but on this she was ahead of the MSM by at least a day, that is when the MSM wasn’t ignoring what was happening in China completely.


Wuhan discussing "synthetically derived viruses": https://web.archive.org/web/20200212011902/http://english.wh...

2017 conference at (Wuhan Institute of a virology) with gain of function research being top priority: http://english.whiov.cas.cn/Exchange2016/International_Confe...

Ecohealth Alliance partnership: https://web.archive.org/web/20210323171425/http://english.wh...

US Gov from state department: http://web.archive.org/web/20210116001621/https://www.state....

EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak discussing gene editing in coronaviruses in december 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-Y843FFJvI

Note: The documentation isn’t even new... all those people banned and censored via Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc [1], have been saying this the entire time. Its kind of amazing to watch both realities (left wing media va alternative media) collide. Gives me hope to be honest.

[1] https://www.projectveritas.com/news/breaking-facebook-whistl...


Also a reminder that "right wing" is such a wonderful term. Mention it, and all the discussion that you don't like can be easily shrugged off, or better, attacked.

Really, why is it so important that we need to pitch left against right? Why can we establish facts, carry out reasoning, and be explicit about interpretation vs conclusion?

How many countries can thrive when all that matters is partisanship or moralizing everything? Maybe Americans should learn a little history about Ming dynasty: The Tung-lin-tang turned everything into evil vs. good, to the point that the government couldn't get anything done and the ruling class couldn't get any fact straight. A dynasty with hundreds of millions of people was conquered by a barbarous tribe, and the entire nation became the laugh stock of the world in merely 150 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macartney_Embassy).

By the way, Tung-lin-tang were experts of mind reading. Their most effective method of attacking their political opponent is to attack their motive. To them, narrative was all that matters.


If it makes you feel better, it's now flagged here, too.

The reputations of media outlets, social or otherwise, are to be protected at all costs.


Because congress bullied them into removing covid misinformation (admittedly mostly relating to vaccines): https://observer.com/2021/03/covid-vaccine-misinformation-fa...

This is true of almost all the social media "censorship" by the way. They have multiple governments either directly passing laws requiring content removal, or pressuring them to remove more.


Facebook, Twitter, and much of the news media have been in the service of CCP as part of an influence operation and suppression of dissent.

There needs to be an investigation. The people involved in these decisions need to be put under oath and testify how they came to the decision to ban users. Emails and messages should be subpoenaed to see if there was illegal coordination across services. There needs to be an complete investigation if any of the people involved were being influenced by or were agents of the CCP.


and here on hacker news the pure science behind this topic was also buried many many times.


Yes, 90% of my downvotes received are from those comment threads... some serious griefing on this topic


Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.

Let's call it for what it is - employees of Facebook and Twitter and Google were complicit in a coverup of malfeasance that cost hundreds of thousands of lives if not more. Named individuals set these policies and put them into action - they need to be exposed and held accountable.


CNN and WP ran headlines on how Fauci shattered Trumps' lab leak lies in 2020. The scorn and derision was palpable.

Fauci has now completely inverted his statement...


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?


This makes me furious


What if deadalus’ claim is not true?

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/

I do not see where discussion lab leak is prohibited.


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."


Thanks for calling that out. This is the only example I've been offered and it's exactly the kind of "talking about the lab-leak theory" that I suspected was less innocent than posed by OP.


That quote of paying “a visit” makes the Zero Hedge article sound more sinister than it actually is. The full sentence from Zero Hedge’s article is: “Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.”

I don’t see anything wrong with that statement. Peng was the publicly listed face of this research lab at WIV, and his name, photo, and contact info were openly displayed on the website as public facing content.

Zero Hedge was banned because the possibility of a lab leak was politicized by those on the left, including tech companies who operate social media platforms, and they unfairly censored and banned this content because they were biased against Trump/Republicans to a point where legitimate speculation was disallowed.


Good revisionism there. The very first sentence they push the bioweapon theory.

https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir...


Indeed, he mentioned "weaponized virus" on the article, I had forgotten that particular bit.


It's been a long 16 months, mistakes happen, maybe I'm running a little low on empathy today too.


That too was and still is legitimate speculation. Josh Rogin of the Washington Post has written about this previously (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...):

> A little-noticed study was released in early July 2020 by a group of Chinese researchers in Beijing, including several affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Science. These scientists said they had created a new model for studying SARS-CoV-2 by creating mice with human-like lung characteristics by using the CRISPR gene-editing technology to give the mice lung cells with the human ACE2 receptor — the cell receptor that allowed coronaviruses to so easily infect human lungs.

The fact remains that this type of speculation about bioweapons should never have been banned. Doing so granted the CCP a huge relief from accountability and transparency, one we may never be able to correct for with all the time that has passed.


Zerohedge getting banned from Twitter for publishing an expose of the Wuhan Lab which is pretty close to what is acknowledged as a probable story these days is the most high profile example.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/zerohedge-banned-from-twitter-...


Is the majority of HN really fighting for Zerohedge to be recognized as a legitimate source of information?


"Recognized as a legitimate source of information" So default censor all non legitimate sources? Who gets to decide what is legitimate?

I don't care for the comments on that site but many times they've had scoops and been proven correct after time has passed.


> So default censor all non legitimate sources

No? Censor sources that have proven time and time again to provide verifiably false information. Zerohedge and Infowars specifically fit into that bucket and it's completely reasonable to shine a light on their lack of trustworthiness.

A lot of folks are saying, "let the people decide what is false!" Well, here's the thing: People are really mind-numbingly stupid. Spend some time using a roundabout in the USA and you'll learn real fast that the average person can't be trusted to be left to their own devices.


To quote Tolstoy: "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."


The New York Times had two years of bad RussiaGate scoops and everyone still trusts them.


Speaking of The New York Times, a NYT reporter tweeted that it was racist to even discuss the lab leak theory:

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/new-york-times-covid-repo...


Is there any 'legitimate' source of information?

Methinks it's all just some form of propaganda, or another, camouflaged as crappy infotainment. So if you are into being brainwashed, you could also don your sunglasses, and have at least some fun, skimming between the lines.


No.


Nice strawman.


And the amount of evidence in both cases is equal right now - slim and circumstantial. Just because one is political doesn't make it more worthy of censorship if you're removing content based on "misinformation." There's no real evidence underlying either statement.


Apparently they did so in consultation with the WHO :)


I thought they banned man-made claims not lab-leak claims.


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