"In light of ongoing investigations into Hussein's regime and in consultation with Department of Defense experts, we will no longer remove the claim that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction."
To highlight how easily this clumsy, "fact checker" based censorship regime can be manipulated, look at this article, which essentially lays out how the initial "debunking" was spearheaded by scientists with direct conflicts of interest:
I posted this same article on the post that came up about India censorship on a thread that discussed lab leaks. Fantastic article that lays out how much circumstantial evidence was in place for a lab leak hypothesis. Enough that we should've always been talking about it. I consider this one of big tech and big media's greatest failings of the last 20 years, censoring this discussion and mocking those who dared to speak about it, just because Trump said it.
I was talking about the circumstantial evidence of the lab leak back in February of 2020 however I decided it was not worth it to continue once it became a topic that would get you de-platformed.
This is one of the few social media platforms I'll share some of my actual beliefs and even here I self censor. I don't so much in private but online there isn't much value in voicing opinions that don't go with the current mainstream views. It's all so sad. 11 - 12 years ago I would get into very spirited and often productive debates and felt I changed minds and had my mind changed many times.
It should be noted that the Chinese ambassador to the US was one of the first to equate the lab leak theory with bigotry and racism towards Chinese Americans.
There always have been and always will be ignorant rubes looking to indulge their prejudices. But as a society we can't allow the existence of these people to prevent us from disgusting legitimate scientific inquiry.
And that is essentially what was done.
It should be noted that a Chinese virologist who first made claims of it coming from a lab who was granted asylum in the United States was removed from Twitter for making these statements. The vitriol and anger directed at her and the fact that she was a published researcher were ignored with media always adding the words "claims to be a virologist" in front of her credentials.
I feel like the 'trust the science' crowd neither understands how scientific theory is actually developed by a debate of ideas and a testing of hypothesis. It feels more like a religion replacement that is steeped in dogma.
Trust the science essentially became hijacked by the anti-Trump crowd, and became a dogma of "trust the scientists the media tells us to" instead of supporting the spirit of free debate and free exchange of ideas.
People knew that it would come to this, where corporations are the final arbiters of the truth value of information, driven by people who loudly demand to shut down anything that doesn't conform to their world view.
People demanded we steer into the iceberg while staring at it.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -C.S. Lewis
That quote (and that chapter from C. S Lewis in general) has been stuck in my mind for essentially the past 14 months. It's crazy how insanely powerful "conscious/virtuous" authoritarianism is. It really makes any discussion or compromise impossible.
Of course the concept can seem very obvious but going through it and seeing how the whole process unfolds is still just hard to believe . We've set the stage for justifying pretty much every excess of authority/control. We somehow managed to make having more freedom something that you should be not only be very afraid of but also something you shouldn't even expect to begin with (which is quite a feat). I can't wait to see what it where that will lead us to!
I'm pretty sure newspapers have been simultaneously Records of truth and corporations since at least the turn of the 19th century, to the include yellow journalism and red scare eras.
It was a huge mistake for them to do this in the first place. Youtube similarly took down videos which were scientifically valid, but not mainstream. Yet, realistically, this was always a plausible hypothesis, there just wasn't evidence to decide one way or another.
FB (and YT and Twitter) should never have been arbiters of discussion. They became privatized Ministries of Truth.
It’s necessary for people to be able to discuss topics even if wrong or uncomfortable in pursuit of truth. Yes, there will be bad faith actors, but they are better than a MoT setting truth.
This was totally idiotic and ideologically driven.
I hope a lesson was learned, but I fear it wasn’t and this will repeat itself because people can’t help but want to drive agendas.
Facebook whistleblowers stepped forward a few days ago and warned that “vaccine hesitancy” scores are being assigned to posts via AI and those with high scores don’t go viral.
It doesn’t matter if the information is true or false, if the content discourages one from taking a vaccine the AIs will censor it.
Considering who/what countries actively invest in all forms of communication there is no meaningful line between the 3 anymore.
Even domestic propaganda becomes suspect when you find out a government officials child has major business dealings with X or Y country. This happens in both parties.
But that is the whole point of the parent. Who is to say it is a "propaganda effort"? FB/TW/YT? Why? How would they know (unless they were part of that effort, ironically)?
True that. More to this, no automatically curated feed should qualify for the Section 230 protection.
We understand that manually curated feed doesn't qualify for Section 230 protection. In this case, automatically curated feed should be legally the same, given that the automation is wholy created and maintained by Facebook or other relevant platform, for the express purpose of scaling out their manual processes.
>FB (and YT and Twitter) should never have been arbiters of discussion. They became privatized Ministries of Truth.
I think they knew there would be issues like this and they would sometimes get it wrong. This is why they tried to avoid being the Ministers of Truth by having so called "fact checkers" determine what is true.
The credibility of these fact checkers and social media should both be tarnished.
In a nutshell, currently, most scientists (specifically, virologists) say that the lab leak theory is the most plausible, given that the Wuhan lab was studying two bat viruses that are (were?) genetically close to SARS2, and a number of lab workers reported symptoms similar to SARS2 in the fall of 2019, when the outbreak is now assumed to have begun.
Virologists currently differ on whether the changes to the virus were natural evolution, man-made, or the result of contamination/poor safety procedures resulting in cross-species mutations. The argument against it being man-made is that currently as far as we know, we don't actually have the proper tools to get the changes that exist in SARS2; the changes are too efficient to have been man-made. The counter to this is that the released version of SARS2 may have been an evolved strain descending from a (less-efficient) man-made virus.
Exactly? Nowhere. The article itself is a summarized timeline of other articles in which a number of virologists with experience in SARS1, ebolavirus, etc., provide their experience-informed opinions. For example, in another article (summarized in the timeline article), the WaPo notes that the head of the WHO believes that the lab leak theory is currently the most plausible, given what is currently known (and not known) about the virus, and given his prior experience in tracking down ebola and marsburg virus outbreaks, I defer to him on this.
Other virologists interviewed for other articles, including those who have worked directly with the lead researcher of the Wuhan virus lab, state that the lab leak theory is the most plausible, especially given the lead researcher's history of disregard for proper safety protocols.
Indeed, what is most notable about the lab leak theory is that there are no virologists publicly willing to state that it is implausible, while there are a great many virologists willing to put their reputations on the line and say that the lab leak is the most plausible, and why they believe that to be the case.
Here's one virologist, Dr. Duehr, who is very confident that covid-19 doesn't have any connection to the Wuhan lab. He backed it up with a detailed reddit post [0], the most comprehensive collection of referenced information that I have seen on this topic. There's a 34 page pdf [1] version of this post that is easier to read.
Specifically regarding the lab leak scenario he references genetic evidence from early cases elsewhere in Hubei province [2], cases hundreds of miles from Wuhan from before the Wuhan meat-market super spreader event. These earlier cases are genetic parents of the cases from the Wuhan market super-spread event. Not the other way around. EDIT: Here's another source [3] that gets into genetic detail, a microbiologist saying the same thing.
I'm curious if you have something from a virologist saying the opposite, that it is more likely that the virus came form a lab than from nature. Most of what I see seems to be the opposite, that the lab is a possibility, but not the most likely.
IOW, his evidence doesn't disprove that the SARS2 outbreak is related to a lab leak from the Wuhan lab. At best, he shows that a related coronavirus also broke out in Hubei province some months earlier. But while genetically similar to COVID19, it wasn't COVID19. At best, it was a precursor strain, but lacking the mutations found in COVID19, the Hunan strain did not reach pandemic status and fizzled out.
Also, the reddit post focuses heavily on debunking the meat-market theory, but meat-market super-spreader event has been debunked for over a year (and had been by the time of the post). The reddit post suggests that a Hunan seafood market was the actual source of the outbreak, despite the fact that the Hunan seafood market is not close to bat habitats nor does it have sellers selling bats. (Note that the Hunan market theory has been advanced by China because the market does sell frozen seafoods imported from other countries, and China currently claims that COVID19 was caused by imported frozen food.)
Other reasons to treat the "debunking" in that reddit comment with a boulder-sized grain of salt: it mixes up the Wuhan and Hunan food markets; the timeline asserts that COVID19 could not be Wuhan-based because was found outside of China by the time of the alleged food market superspreader event, but this timeline actually fits with what we now know about COVID19: that it had already begun spreading in humans by the fall of 2019; one of the big revelations following the WHO report was that multiple Wuhan lab staff were infected with COVID19 in early fall 2019 with the strain that ultimately reached pandemic status.
The lab-leak hypothesis does not assume that COVID19 was man-made. It assumes that it leaked from the lab due to negligence or failures in safety protocols.
Wet market as opposed to meat market, I didn't mean to misquote Dr. Deuhr.
Are you saying that there were people infected with covid-19 600 miles away from Wuhan, before cases originating in the Wuhan wet market, with covid-19 viruses that were genetic patents of those found in people infected in Wuhan, but that the virus still came from Wuhan?
> Analysis of the first 41 Covid-19 patients in medical journal the Lancet found that 27 of them had direct exposure to the Wuhan market. But the same analysis found that the first known case of the illness did not. [0]
> Lab Leak scenarios are inconsistent with several established facts regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The majority of early cases were linked to different markets that sold wildlife or wildlife products in Wuhan. [1]
I don't buy your original assertion that "most scientists […] say that the lab leak theory is the most plausible". The articles you linked to do not support that.
And your assertion about a lab leak that "there are no virologists publicly willing to state that it is implausible" is wrong, I just supplied two. Most of the news quotes from virologist I read say "nature probable, lab-leak possible, lab-made not feasible".
1) The issue isn't you mixing up the terms, its that the Dr you cite mixes up the terms. The Hunan market isn't close to bats, nor were bats sold there, moreover, the Hunan strain was not as similar to COVID19 as the Wuhan strain. Dr Deuhr does not provide anything to support his theory that the Hunan strain was COVID19, though he demonstrates that the Hunan strain is related to COVID19 and might be a predecessor. (However, most coronaviruses are genetically very similar; the reason we had vaccines so quickly was because SARS2 is actually genetically close to SARS1, and they've been working on vaccines for that for almost 2 decades.)
2) I don't care what articles from Spring 2020 say about the virus' origins, related to meat markets, etc. We know more now than we did back then, including, for example, that the virus was already spreading before the meat market incidents cited in the WHO report...though China waited until after the WHO report was published to admit that the first cluster of COVID19 cases occurred several months before any of the meat market incidents identified in the report.
The largest and earliest known cluster of infections confirmed to be COVID19 were Wuhan staff members occurring in late summer/early fall 2019 (or in other words, 6 months before the earliest cluster traceable to any food market) and those staffers all just happened to be studying the bat viruses that were the most genetically similar to the initial pandemic strain of COVID19, and it just so happens that most of the mutations in that initial strain of COVID19 were all present in the various strains of coronavirus also being studied in the lab (though it is not clear if those sickened staffers were also studying those other strains).
Is it possible the lab workers picked it up from the food market? Sure, but then the question becomes why did several unrelated Wuhan lab workers get infected at the same time...but nobody else at the food market for 5-6 more months?
3) You supplied two quotes from Spring 2020, when the earliest known cases were the Wuhan food market cluster. Are those experts willing to say the lab-leak theory is not feasible, knowing now that the first cluster was among Wuhan lab workers?
4) The lab leak theory is not that the virus was man-made, the theory is that it leaked from the lab. The lab leak theory does not posit how COVID19 originated. COVID19 could have been among the samples of bat viruses being studied by the lab (i.e., already present in the wild), or it could have resulted from cross contamination between samples (several researchers that have worked with the head of the Wuhan lab have accused her of recklessness regarding safety protocols).
The biggest circumstantial factor supporting the lab-leak theory: this theory could easily have been proven false if China had opened up its Wuhan lab to foreign researchers. But China chose not to, because it clearly had something to hide. Presumably, that something is that outbreak was traceable to the lab in some way.
I've been interested and following the science around this. I've been heavily favoring genetic evidence over other things, those other things tending to be circumstantial, conflicting, and/or not well sourced. So I give the most weight to published scientific studies and information presented by scientists helping me connect and crosscheck those dots.
There's a lot of data. Here's a couple of the specific references throwing doubt on Wuhan as the origin for the pandemic [0] [1]. I know these are from last March, but I don't think that invalidates them, unless there are new studies with conflicting info. Here's another one on how 2.7% of people tested in villages near bat caves had antibodies from bat coronavirus infections during the prior 2-3 years [2], with only 1 person out of 218 who touched a dead bat, and 20 who saw bats fly over their houses. Nobody eating bats. Nature happens, viruses spread.
It's hard for me to blame the lab based on nothing more than
circumstantial evidence at this point, which mostly points towards bats, when it's known that there are hundreds of coronaviruses, and hundreds of mammal species they can jump across, and the history of all kinds of viruses jumping between animals and people, even specifically coronaviruses jumping from bats to people. I just don't feel the need to blame the lab without solid evidence when nature does things like this as a matter of course.
I assume that you would agree this is not definitively proven either way yet - nature vs lab? We appear to base our opinions on different evidence and lean in different directions on the probabilities.
I'm actually kind of flummoxed about your statement that "most scientists (specifically, virologists) say that the lab leak theory is the most plausible". That's not what I'm seeing at all. They pretty much all seem to be saying most likely from bats, lab leak could be possible. Seems like you were exaggerating.
So the wonderful thing about social media is we're back to having citizen reporters. News and information isn't just what CNN and Fox tells us what is news, it's now done the way it was originally envisioned: by citizens. This has given us insights into things like which companies are shady, the widespread practice police brutalization, and many other things.
Removing section 230 will remove that platform and return us to the CNN and Fox being the gatekeepers of information I'm afraid.
The better answer is to disallow social media companies to consolidate and monopolize. We already have the laws on the books.
Do you seriously think if congress passed a law stripping Facebook and Twitter of Section 230 that somehow, overnight, they will just magically disappear from the world? I sure don't, especially since it costs money to moderate content.
>that somehow, overnight, they will just magically disappear from the world?
Those are your words not mine. It wouldn't happen overnight, but it wouldn't be recognizable within a year or less.
They would remove almost all content to avoid liability, absolutely. 230 shields them from liability for the content they host (for the most part). It would turn into nothing but network shows and commercials, just like TV was 10-20 years ago.
Here's what EFF describes it, and they support keeping it.
Removing 230 would absolutely be an affront to citizens free speech and freedom to broadcast. I understand why people don't like it, but the alternative (removing it) is much, much worse.
Think of it this way, say you hosted a blog on your own server and you had comments. Now once 230 gets repealed, you are open to lawsuits from anyone concerning any of the comments on your blog, including lawsuits with no merit that you still have to defend. Would you keep comments open? Probably not and even if you did, you probably wouldn't for long for one reason or the other (probably because you were sued).
Hell, HN probably wouldn't even be the same. As soon as someone says x company sucks in a comment, HN is now open to a libel lawsuit, meritless or not. HN would have to decide if hiring full time moderators and a legal team for content would be worth the effort to keep the site up. It might be, but for many, if not most sites, it's not.
Section 230 is flawed but important. Sites shouldn't be punished due to the actions of users. However it should be amended to require sites to uphold certain speech protections of their users in order to receive section 230 protection. In other words making the decision to censor content that isn't illegal or beyond a reasonable standard of moderation (ie: removing spam and the like) means the site is taking responsibility for the content posted by users and therefore is liable for it.
Simple as that, you can't have it both ways. I think the provision should also only come into effect above a certain size. We dont want the FCC coming down hard on the petunia enthusiast's forms because they banned someone for starting threads about something other than petunias. And I think reasonable people can agree on the idea of a forum growing large enough to defacto become "public". There is already a legal framework for treating private property as public forums, for example when city councils would meet on private property they couldn't censor discussion just because they weren't on public land.
We can be a bit more specific to it: no automatically curated feed should qualify for the Section 230 protection. Simple feeds ordered by time (or however the original poster arranged it) with no suppression, should carry regular Section 230 protection in the usual way.
We understand that feeds curated manually by platform employees doesn't qualify for Section 230 protection, example being any regular newspaper's articles. In case of online platforms, automatically curated feed should be legally similar, given that the automation is wholy created and maintained by the platform, for the express purpose of scaling out their manual processes.
What qualifies as automatically curated? If someone in India just presses a button all day to accept algorithmic feed curation recommendations, is that automatic or manual? Where is the line?
so they still continue their "fact checking", even though now it's clear all the fact checkers were wrong on this one. just call it what it is then, censoring.
Lets be real - the reason Facebook and other networks were banning these opinions wasn't because they were scientifically unviable, it was because they were right-wing talking points.
They were trying to tamp down on the QAnon stuff and this got caught in the net.
But boy, censoring some opinion and then having it turn out to possibly be true looks BAD!
Seriously though, my boomer parents believe literally every single thing they see passed around on Facebook, no matter how outrageously improbable. Is there any balanced, non-censorship way to curb the spread of stupid bullshit that doesn’t trample on people’s rights and occasionally flag a true fact as a lie?
I’m seriously asking, because I don’t know the answer.
>But boy, censoring some opinion and then having it turn out to possibly be true looks BAD!
Yes, but also no.
People were claiming Facebook and the rest of social media had such an absolute, Orwellian grip on free speech, information and human communication that if they censored it, it was in effect erased from existence, like Stalin erasing Trotsky.
And yet the actual effect of that censorship on public debate and discovery, by the platforms people accuse of acting as "Ministries of Truth," turns out to have been practically inconsequential.
If anything, it's proven that much of the fear mongering around social media, deplatforming and cancel culture is overblown.
Another thought: I’m pretty sure that many of the alternative facts that get passed around are not propagated despite being improbable, but because they are improbable. The bigger lie triggers the amygdala in a way that the little one doesn’t, so that one is paradoxically more likely to get passed on.
Doesn’t help that every once in a while some conspiracy turns out to be true (cointelpro, Snowden documents).
> The bigger lie triggers the amygdala in a way that the little one doesn’t, so that one is paradoxically more likely to get passed on.
That would explain how a conspiracy theory about a secret cabal of blood-drinking satanic pedophiles among the Democratic Party went from 4chan shitposts to a nationwide Christian apocalypse cult to a political platform that actually got someone elected to the House of Representatives. Galaxy amygdala.
Stalin's grip wasn't absolute either. We still know about Trotsky, despite his efforts. That doesn't mean the censorship didn't have very real consequences.
These platforms have had very large societal effects both through the spreading of misinformation with things like QAnon, and from the censorship on information pertaining to elections, and this entire pandemic. It is hard to say what to do for those that so gullible as to believe everything they read or hear.
"It's not censorship! It's not a free-speech issue! It has nothing to do with the first amendment or freedom! They're a private company! If you don't like it just don't use Facebook (or Twitter, or Youtube, or Google, or Gmail, or...)"
Do you get it now? Are you starting to understand? This was always going to be the end result. A world of information controlled by the powerful, where encyclopedias, dictionaries, and history books flex and bend with each new re-writing of reality that becomes necessary to protect their interests. Yesterday, we were never at war with Oceania, and claiming we were would get you banned. Today we have always been at war with Oceania, and saying so is perfectly fine. What new reality will we wake to tomorrow? And why is anyone who isn't obscenely wealthy still defending these people?
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadhttps://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
This is one of the few social media platforms I'll share some of my actual beliefs and even here I self censor. I don't so much in private but online there isn't much value in voicing opinions that don't go with the current mainstream views. It's all so sad. 11 - 12 years ago I would get into very spirited and often productive debates and felt I changed minds and had my mind changed many times.
It should be noted that the Chinese ambassador to the US was one of the first to equate the lab leak theory with bigotry and racism towards Chinese Americans.
There always have been and always will be ignorant rubes looking to indulge their prejudices. But as a society we can't allow the existence of these people to prevent us from disgusting legitimate scientific inquiry.
And that is essentially what was done.
It should be noted that a Chinese virologist who first made claims of it coming from a lab who was granted asylum in the United States was removed from Twitter for making these statements. The vitriol and anger directed at her and the fact that she was a published researcher were ignored with media always adding the words "claims to be a virologist" in front of her credentials.
People demanded we steer into the iceberg while staring at it.
Of course the concept can seem very obvious but going through it and seeing how the whole process unfolds is still just hard to believe . We've set the stage for justifying pretty much every excess of authority/control. We somehow managed to make having more freedom something that you should be not only be very afraid of but also something you shouldn't even expect to begin with (which is quite a feat). I can't wait to see what it where that will lead us to!
Now all you hear is what you are allowed to hear, but instead of it coming from 1 source, it falsely looks like thousands of sources.
It’s necessary for people to be able to discuss topics even if wrong or uncomfortable in pursuit of truth. Yes, there will be bad faith actors, but they are better than a MoT setting truth.
This was totally idiotic and ideologically driven.
I hope a lesson was learned, but I fear it wasn’t and this will repeat itself because people can’t help but want to drive agendas.
Facebook whistleblowers stepped forward a few days ago and warned that “vaccine hesitancy” scores are being assigned to posts via AI and those with high scores don’t go viral.
It doesn’t matter if the information is true or false, if the content discourages one from taking a vaccine the AIs will censor it.
In addition whats the difference between foreign propaganda, domestic propaganda and corporate propaganda?
Even domestic propaganda becomes suspect when you find out a government officials child has major business dealings with X or Y country. This happens in both parties.
The only thing worse than government sensorship is privatised mafia sensorship
We understand that manually curated feed doesn't qualify for Section 230 protection. In this case, automatically curated feed should be legally the same, given that the automation is wholy created and maintained by Facebook or other relevant platform, for the express purpose of scaling out their manual processes.
I think they knew there would be issues like this and they would sometimes get it wrong. This is why they tried to avoid being the Ministers of Truth by having so called "fact checkers" determine what is true.
The credibility of these fact checkers and social media should both be tarnished.
In a nutshell, currently, most scientists (specifically, virologists) say that the lab leak theory is the most plausible, given that the Wuhan lab was studying two bat viruses that are (were?) genetically close to SARS2, and a number of lab workers reported symptoms similar to SARS2 in the fall of 2019, when the outbreak is now assumed to have begun.
Virologists currently differ on whether the changes to the virus were natural evolution, man-made, or the result of contamination/poor safety procedures resulting in cross-species mutations. The argument against it being man-made is that currently as far as we know, we don't actually have the proper tools to get the changes that exist in SARS2; the changes are too efficient to have been man-made. The counter to this is that the released version of SARS2 may have been an evolved strain descending from a (less-efficient) man-made virus.
Other virologists interviewed for other articles, including those who have worked directly with the lead researcher of the Wuhan virus lab, state that the lab leak theory is the most plausible, especially given the lead researcher's history of disregard for proper safety protocols.
Indeed, what is most notable about the lab leak theory is that there are no virologists publicly willing to state that it is implausible, while there are a great many virologists willing to put their reputations on the line and say that the lab leak is the most plausible, and why they believe that to be the case.
Specifically regarding the lab leak scenario he references genetic evidence from early cases elsewhere in Hubei province [2], cases hundreds of miles from Wuhan from before the Wuhan meat-market super spreader event. These earlier cases are genetic parents of the cases from the Wuhan market super-spread event. Not the other way around. EDIT: Here's another source [3] that gets into genetic detail, a microbiologist saying the same thing.
I'm curious if you have something from a virologist saying the opposite, that it is more likely that the virus came form a lab than from nature. Most of what I see seems to be the opposite, that the lab is a possibility, but not the most likely.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
[1] https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
[3] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3
IOW, his evidence doesn't disprove that the SARS2 outbreak is related to a lab leak from the Wuhan lab. At best, he shows that a related coronavirus also broke out in Hubei province some months earlier. But while genetically similar to COVID19, it wasn't COVID19. At best, it was a precursor strain, but lacking the mutations found in COVID19, the Hunan strain did not reach pandemic status and fizzled out.
Also, the reddit post focuses heavily on debunking the meat-market theory, but meat-market super-spreader event has been debunked for over a year (and had been by the time of the post). The reddit post suggests that a Hunan seafood market was the actual source of the outbreak, despite the fact that the Hunan seafood market is not close to bat habitats nor does it have sellers selling bats. (Note that the Hunan market theory has been advanced by China because the market does sell frozen seafoods imported from other countries, and China currently claims that COVID19 was caused by imported frozen food.)
Other reasons to treat the "debunking" in that reddit comment with a boulder-sized grain of salt: it mixes up the Wuhan and Hunan food markets; the timeline asserts that COVID19 could not be Wuhan-based because was found outside of China by the time of the alleged food market superspreader event, but this timeline actually fits with what we now know about COVID19: that it had already begun spreading in humans by the fall of 2019; one of the big revelations following the WHO report was that multiple Wuhan lab staff were infected with COVID19 in early fall 2019 with the strain that ultimately reached pandemic status.
The lab-leak hypothesis does not assume that COVID19 was man-made. It assumes that it leaked from the lab due to negligence or failures in safety protocols.
Are you saying that there were people infected with covid-19 600 miles away from Wuhan, before cases originating in the Wuhan wet market, with covid-19 viruses that were genetic patents of those found in people infected in Wuhan, but that the virus still came from Wuhan?
> Analysis of the first 41 Covid-19 patients in medical journal the Lancet found that 27 of them had direct exposure to the Wuhan market. But the same analysis found that the first known case of the illness did not. [0]
> Lab Leak scenarios are inconsistent with several established facts regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The majority of early cases were linked to different markets that sold wildlife or wildlife products in Wuhan. [1]
I don't buy your original assertion that "most scientists […] say that the lab leak theory is the most plausible". The articles you linked to do not support that.
And your assertion about a lab leak that "there are no virologists publicly willing to state that it is implausible" is wrong, I just supplied two. Most of the news quotes from virologist I read say "nature probable, lab-leak possible, lab-made not feasible".
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/how-did-the-co...
[1] https://virological.org/t/early-appearance-of-two-distinct-g...
2) I don't care what articles from Spring 2020 say about the virus' origins, related to meat markets, etc. We know more now than we did back then, including, for example, that the virus was already spreading before the meat market incidents cited in the WHO report...though China waited until after the WHO report was published to admit that the first cluster of COVID19 cases occurred several months before any of the meat market incidents identified in the report.
The largest and earliest known cluster of infections confirmed to be COVID19 were Wuhan staff members occurring in late summer/early fall 2019 (or in other words, 6 months before the earliest cluster traceable to any food market) and those staffers all just happened to be studying the bat viruses that were the most genetically similar to the initial pandemic strain of COVID19, and it just so happens that most of the mutations in that initial strain of COVID19 were all present in the various strains of coronavirus also being studied in the lab (though it is not clear if those sickened staffers were also studying those other strains).
Is it possible the lab workers picked it up from the food market? Sure, but then the question becomes why did several unrelated Wuhan lab workers get infected at the same time...but nobody else at the food market for 5-6 more months?
3) You supplied two quotes from Spring 2020, when the earliest known cases were the Wuhan food market cluster. Are those experts willing to say the lab-leak theory is not feasible, knowing now that the first cluster was among Wuhan lab workers?
4) The lab leak theory is not that the virus was man-made, the theory is that it leaked from the lab. The lab leak theory does not posit how COVID19 originated. COVID19 could have been among the samples of bat viruses being studied by the lab (i.e., already present in the wild), or it could have resulted from cross contamination between samples (several researchers that have worked with the head of the Wuhan lab have accused her of recklessness regarding safety protocols).
The biggest circumstantial factor supporting the lab-leak theory: this theory could easily have been proven false if China had opened up its Wuhan lab to foreign researchers. But China chose not to, because it clearly had something to hide. Presumably, that something is that outbreak was traceable to the lab in some way.
There's a lot of data. Here's a couple of the specific references throwing doubt on Wuhan as the origin for the pandemic [0] [1]. I know these are from last March, but I don't think that invalidates them, unless there are new studies with conflicting info. Here's another one on how 2.7% of people tested in villages near bat caves had antibodies from bat coronavirus infections during the prior 2-3 years [2], with only 1 person out of 218 who touched a dead bat, and 20 who saw bats fly over their houses. Nobody eating bats. Nature happens, viruses spread.
It's hard for me to blame the lab based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence at this point, which mostly points towards bats, when it's known that there are hundreds of coronaviruses, and hundreds of mammal species they can jump across, and the history of all kinds of viruses jumping between animals and people, even specifically coronaviruses jumping from bats to people. I just don't feel the need to blame the lab without solid evidence when nature does things like this as a matter of course.
I assume that you would agree this is not definitively proven either way yet - nature vs lab? We appear to base our opinions on different evidence and lean in different directions on the probabilities.
I'm actually kind of flummoxed about your statement that "most scientists (specifically, virologists) say that the lab leak theory is the most plausible". That's not what I'm seeing at all. They pretty much all seem to be saying most likely from bats, lab leak could be possible. Seems like you were exaggerating.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...
[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/
Most were appealed.
Removing section 230 will remove that platform and return us to the CNN and Fox being the gatekeepers of information I'm afraid.
The better answer is to disallow social media companies to consolidate and monopolize. We already have the laws on the books.
Those are your words not mine. It wouldn't happen overnight, but it wouldn't be recognizable within a year or less.
They would remove almost all content to avoid liability, absolutely. 230 shields them from liability for the content they host (for the most part). It would turn into nothing but network shows and commercials, just like TV was 10-20 years ago.
Here's what EFF describes it, and they support keeping it.
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
Removing 230 would absolutely be an affront to citizens free speech and freedom to broadcast. I understand why people don't like it, but the alternative (removing it) is much, much worse.
Think of it this way, say you hosted a blog on your own server and you had comments. Now once 230 gets repealed, you are open to lawsuits from anyone concerning any of the comments on your blog, including lawsuits with no merit that you still have to defend. Would you keep comments open? Probably not and even if you did, you probably wouldn't for long for one reason or the other (probably because you were sued).
Hell, HN probably wouldn't even be the same. As soon as someone says x company sucks in a comment, HN is now open to a libel lawsuit, meritless or not. HN would have to decide if hiring full time moderators and a legal team for content would be worth the effort to keep the site up. It might be, but for many, if not most sites, it's not.
Simple as that, you can't have it both ways. I think the provision should also only come into effect above a certain size. We dont want the FCC coming down hard on the petunia enthusiast's forms because they banned someone for starting threads about something other than petunias. And I think reasonable people can agree on the idea of a forum growing large enough to defacto become "public". There is already a legal framework for treating private property as public forums, for example when city councils would meet on private property they couldn't censor discussion just because they weren't on public land.
We understand that feeds curated manually by platform employees doesn't qualify for Section 230 protection, example being any regular newspaper's articles. In case of online platforms, automatically curated feed should be legally similar, given that the automation is wholy created and maintained by the platform, for the express purpose of scaling out their manual processes.
But boy, censoring some opinion and then having it turn out to possibly be true looks BAD!
Seriously though, my boomer parents believe literally every single thing they see passed around on Facebook, no matter how outrageously improbable. Is there any balanced, non-censorship way to curb the spread of stupid bullshit that doesn’t trample on people’s rights and occasionally flag a true fact as a lie?
I’m seriously asking, because I don’t know the answer.
Yes, but also no.
People were claiming Facebook and the rest of social media had such an absolute, Orwellian grip on free speech, information and human communication that if they censored it, it was in effect erased from existence, like Stalin erasing Trotsky.
And yet the actual effect of that censorship on public debate and discovery, by the platforms people accuse of acting as "Ministries of Truth," turns out to have been practically inconsequential.
If anything, it's proven that much of the fear mongering around social media, deplatforming and cancel culture is overblown.
Another thought: I’m pretty sure that many of the alternative facts that get passed around are not propagated despite being improbable, but because they are improbable. The bigger lie triggers the amygdala in a way that the little one doesn’t, so that one is paradoxically more likely to get passed on.
Doesn’t help that every once in a while some conspiracy turns out to be true (cointelpro, Snowden documents).
That would explain how a conspiracy theory about a secret cabal of blood-drinking satanic pedophiles among the Democratic Party went from 4chan shitposts to a nationwide Christian apocalypse cult to a political platform that actually got someone elected to the House of Representatives. Galaxy amygdala.
What "very real" consequences did Facebook have beyond its platform?
Stalin only had control over the speech and thoughts of around one hundred million people in one country.
Zuckerberg has control over the speech and thoughts of around three billion people in countries across the world.
That's ridiculous, Zuckerberg has control over neither.
Does my cellular service provider control my speech and thoughts?
Does Microsoft control my speech and thoughts because I use Windows?
Does the Post Office control my speech and thoughts because they collect and deliver the mail?
No, no and no. I don't think you understand what the word "control" means.
You don't think communication influences or directs people's behavior?
These platforms have had very large societal effects both through the spreading of misinformation with things like QAnon, and from the censorship on information pertaining to elections, and this entire pandemic. It is hard to say what to do for those that so gullible as to believe everything they read or hear.
Grow up, child.
More importantly, those explanations and labels should change if the concensus changes.
Do you get it now? Are you starting to understand? This was always going to be the end result. A world of information controlled by the powerful, where encyclopedias, dictionaries, and history books flex and bend with each new re-writing of reality that becomes necessary to protect their interests. Yesterday, we were never at war with Oceania, and claiming we were would get you banned. Today we have always been at war with Oceania, and saying so is perfectly fine. What new reality will we wake to tomorrow? And why is anyone who isn't obscenely wealthy still defending these people?