"ZH was talking about coronavirus way earlier than anyone else"

I've seen that claim too and found it questionable. Almost every major news outlet that would cover international news I found had some story about coronavirus pretty dang early. It wasn't a breathless story predicting the impact, but they covered it.

I feel like most media "media does this" or "didn't do that" is mostly just what passed in front of someone's nose.

Purely anecdotal experience of mine was a reddit story ages ago that was "The Media is too busy covering X to cover this story Y."

Purely out of curiosity I turned around and flipped on the TV and checked the news channels. The first 3 news channels, 2 were covering Y... but the claims about nobody covering it were constant.

ZH was saying that it was going to be a catastrophe before China even started lying about how they had it under control.

To be fair, almost everything on ZH is predicting catastrophe - ZH is rife with prepper-flavored "this is the big one" reports on things like FEMA operations, rumors of potential false flag attacks, and of course various financial instrument movements. 99% of what ZH says is the end of all things fades into nothingness.

ZH is the canonical example of a correct-twice-daily broken clock.

Exactly this! Thank you. ZeroHedge almost seems to be designed to induce anxiety and spread disinformation.

If it was not designed that way, there's certainly an incentive for that behavior to evolve.

The question is if we want to prevent all news sources from evolving into that.

It does what it says on the tin -- zero hedge.

Oh for sure. They’re a bunch of lunatics. If you assume the worst four times a day you’re going to be correct sooner or later.

> China even started lying about how they had it under control.

If you think China was lying about it, you should see the public statements of checks notes every head of state in the West.

Outside of Trump... i'm not aware of any large scale deception or ... just plain ignorance when it comes to trump.

Britain said that they could go for a "herd immunity strategy", several European governments said that masks were not useful for ordinary people, claims that the virus was under control, even people saying "don't stop going to bars", entire governments deciding to stop releasing information about cases, etc., etc.

There was a whole lot that people didn't know, especially early. There were quite a few failures of communication and delays.

China was certainly communicating warnings about the virus by early January.

> several European governments said that masks were not useful for ordinary people,

For the very simple reason that there weren't enough masks for the people that needed them ( medical personnel), and the last thing you wants in such a scenario is for the public to freak out and fight over the already non-existing stocks.

Plenty of governments were too slow to react ( with lockdowns/limitations, or planning), but to say all Western leaders failed is simply wrong.

They were wrong, potentially and have adjusted their stance since.

They’re still poorly managing it because they lack decent information. I’d argue it’s the fault of the civil service that they’ve been crippling and obvious cronyism (e.g. Dido Harding) not equipped to provide decent information that they need for decision making.

> They were wrong, potentially and have adjusted their stance since.

Yes, and there is a period between where they realize they are wrong, where they reformulate their message and then communicate that publicly. What we're discussing here is a similar gap of 2-4 days between evidence of person-to-person spread and communication.

Meanwhile, we have no idea when the US president even first tested positive for covid.

The British government was very upfront about the fact that it wasn't under control very early on. That honesty doesn't seem to have worked out very well for them politically - I'm pretty sure that being so upfront about it fuelled a lot of the speculation about herd immunity, which somehow seems to have outlasted the current Europe-wide practical demonstration that yes, lockdown fatigue is real no matter what the British press said at the time - but you certainly can't argue that they lied about it like China did.

The difference is, most news outlets were spending their time saying the coronavirus was less severe than the flu.

"most news outlets were spending their time saying the coronavirus was less severe than the flu"

I don't recall many news outlets putting out official positions...

4Chan is light years ahead of ZH and the rest. There were posts that were so eerily accurate about the virus late Dec into the first couple of weeks of January it was freakish.

People like to write off 4Chan for all the shit posting and racism, etc. But if you can ignore all that there are truly some amazing Gems to be found.

Source on the late December? Early January is irrelevant, but I would like to see the former if that is a true claim.

You can check on 4plebs. I don't read 4chan, but the same is true of 8chan and far-right Telegram - extremist doomers tend to be good early warning system for incidents that seem to bear out their apocalyptic worldview.

Maybe so, but I absolutely don't believe that anybody on 4chan was discussing covid prior to December 29. People can pretend it gets the "scoop" all they want in their little fantasy world, just want to call out the veracity of those claims when I see them.

It seems they first took up discussing it on January 2, (based on a CBS news report) which is reasonably quick off the mark. The main difference between imageboards and other media is their willingness to take up a topic seriously before it arrives in the mainstream, for good or (more often) ill.

https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/238064455/#238064455

Yes, those comments are definitely indicative of them taking it seriously.

Pretty quick, I'll give them that, but not before coverage - this is only a week or so before I became aware of the virus. Granted, I was traveling in China at the time, but it was known.

I only mean seriously in the sense of giving their attention to it, in somewhat the same way as sewer sampling can be a useful way to detect emerging COVID clusters. Online extremists glom onto anything involving political instability because it's a potential opportunity. I noticed the same thing with the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

There is also this October 2019 thread [0] which mentions a coronavirus-like bioweapon, which, like the "High Incident Project" thread [1] (covered by snopes here [2]) is often pointed to by conspiracy theorists as examples of insiders leaking information on 4chan before events of global significance.

In my analysis I find these are examples of fitting events to predictions after the fact; the huge number of 'larp' threads on conspiracy forums allows for cherry-picking examples where some content later rhymed with reality.

[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/230585890/#q230593401

[1] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/141096258/#141102703

[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/4chan-user-prediction-las-...

That 4chan thread is talking about the October 2019 report from

https://www.ghsindex.org/

sponsored in part by the Gates Foundation and reported by the Washington Post and others, retweeted by Joe Biden.

This was not secret insider information.

The closest I could find in online archives to a December 2019 pandemic discussion on 4chan was this single (terribly racist and cruel) comment from December 30th[0], "Don't worry. The worlds going to suffer a global pandemic soon (very, very, soon) which will wipe out poor urban populations..."

[0] https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/237746333/#q237746818 (Warning, this link contains graphic hate speech like much of 4chan does and is not suitable for human consumption.)

As expected.

Wasn't some mathematical problem solved by 4chan?

https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...

It also serves to amplify a lot of fake stories without doing any research to confirm if there is any proof of said stories.