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.
The power to silence will always be abused.
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...
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.
I will assume that's true, or you won't find this reply very convincing.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I don't see that as a problem.
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.
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 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 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.
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."
I remember reading that there are huge populations in which 'the internet' is facebook - so if fbk censors you - you do not exist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
This bizarre HN notion that every big company is a "monopoly" needs to die. Being popular doesn't make you a monopoly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There absolutely is. Twitter enjoys an incredible geographic monopoly. The territory just happens to be digital.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Usually you have multiple chances to fight it. The owner of a square continues to own it because it makes them money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why was the lab leak claim labeled “fringe” in the first place?
You want Zuckerberg deciding what ideas you should and shouldn’t see?
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.
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.
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).
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.
> Virtually no aspect of your statement extends beyond press headlines
I didn't realize I was writing an exam with essay-type questions.
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.
Not here to open your eyes for you, but again I appreciate you exposing your perspectives to the light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence
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.
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)
https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...
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
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."
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea...
And in video form here:
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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)
How can you be so gung-ho with relatively new vaccines, but bury relatively benign and longer standing interventions?
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.
My guess is they're afraid of what happens if/when some anti-anti-vax activist group uses it to justify aggressively regulating Youtube.
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.
Could it be to protect their advertising revenue interests from the huge Pharmaceutical Industry?
It's probably ideological, they literally called themselves "The Good Censor". They think is a right thing to do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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-...
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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. :)
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.
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.
A lab having a bunch of samples in a refrigerator doesn't mean that a spill causes them all to spontaneously recombinate.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 don't envy the task of making a call on any of this stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When Jack banned zerohedge for their article, there were other reasons than "misinformation". Only he and his masters know those reasons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
A system that prevents only Holocaust denial and flat earth theories is unlikely to ban anything that is actually true.
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.
Who would be the one to determine what is misinformation and what is not?
'Evidence' is tangential to the decision making behind misinformation tags.
Who should evaluate the evidence for its credibility?
Who has the right to tell others what they may, and may not, decide for themselves?
Why the Ministry of Truth of course
Don't do this. It's hand-waving and people can read all kinds of things into it.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi
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.
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...
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 think that characterizing this fact as an “ongoing spike in anti-Asian hate crimes” is a breathtakingly broad generalization.
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.
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.
I for one think it is very important to establish if it was the product of bioweapon program (or not).
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?
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...
Facebook's April 2020 covid-19 policy notice only mentions "man-made". https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/
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.
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.)
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.
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...
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.
The reputations of media outlets, social or otherwise, are to be protected at all costs.
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.
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.
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.
Fauci has now completely inverted his statement...
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?
https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/
I do not see where discussion lab leak is prohibited.
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.
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...
> 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."
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.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir...
> 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.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/zerohedge-banned-from-twitter-...
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.
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.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/new-york-times-covid-repo...
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.