Is there a specific legal test you could propose to distinguish actually 'dangerously untrue' information from info which just threatens existing power structures?
Act I: there was no solid evidence as to where COVID originated. There was speculation of various kinds ranging from transmission from a bat cave via wet markets, to lab leak at a Wuhan lab, to it being a bio weapon. Nobody had solid evidence though people started digging.
Act II: a group of pundits and conservative political operatives who were already known to be liars and blowhards latched onto the lab leak theory. It just so happened that it was politically advantageous for the GOP to push anti-Chinese sentiment at the time and a lab leak theory would point the finger directly at the Chinese government. They presented no evidence and had no evidence. They started spreading this theory along with various online groups all known for spreading disinformation. The clear undertone of this message was a call for violence against Asian Americans.
Act III: in reaction to the calls for violence tech companies started curbing spread of this message. Remember some of the other things these same people were saying: that COVID was fake and invented by the US government to keep us indoors while they installed 5G towers everywhere to control our minds; that staying home and wearing masks was designed to weaken our immune systems to prepare for some kind of bio weapon attack; that Bill Gates was using vaccines to implant trackers in every arm of every individual around the world; that the mRNA vaccines are designed to let Pfizer and Moderna copyright or trademark your DNA such that they own you and you become their slave; that nobody actually was dying from COVID and this was a massive coverup designed to make Trump look bad.
Act IV: evidence had emerged that the lab leak theory might have credibility. The tech companies lifted the filtering efforts.
---
Note that this is in no way different than if I tell you that lizard people from Mars run the US government and you tell me to shut the fuck up. I might be right and maybe evidence later shows up that in fact lizard people form Mars do run the US government, but since I have no evidence at the moment this is just bullshit at best and a call for insurrection at worst. Even a broken clock it right twice a day and when liars say something there is less than neutral reason to trust what they say. When mostly liars are frothing at the mouth spreading a theory, well it sure walks, talks, and sounds like a conspiracy theory. Had the people spreading the lab leak theory initially taken the time to do proper research and present any kind of shred of evidence then maybe it would have been treated differently. But as is they had no credibility to begin with, so is it that surprising that what they had to say was treated as lies, especially given their clear conflict of interest?
And yes I am aware of individual incidents of various investigators being hampered by their higher ups from looking into the lab leak theory. I read those stories in nuance and what I gleamed is that it was (a) partly incompetence and (b) partly reactionary to the bullshit that the talking heads on TV were spreading. Maybe what we should focus on is holding the talking heads on TV to some standard of reality and these things won't happen instead of crying "censorship!" when someone calls for violence against an ethnic group based on unsubstantiated (at least at the time and still currently not proven) theory.
People said the lab leak theory was debunked because Trump said it.
Maybe what we should focus on is holding HN posters to some standard of reality and these things won't happen.
Pointing out such a difference is not being pedantic, and in fact is hugely important
Even experts are on a shaky ground when almost all primary information sources are controlled by a non-cooperative party. The only thing concerning the origin of the epidemics that is beyond reasonable doubt is the genetic sequence of the virus. We do not even know for sure who the first covid-19 patient really was and when.
Of course it is hard to speak with confidence in such a situation.
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/15/1016436749/who-chief-wuhan-la...
"It Was Premature To Rule Out A Lab Leak" === We do not have enough evidence to definitively rule it out.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/841925672/scientists-debunk-l...
This guy became a little controversial [1] after a FOIA request turned up emails in which he appears to be conspiring with colleagues to manipulate public perception:
> “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”
> Baric agreed, writing back, “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”
[1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/15/1016436749/who-chief-wuhan-la...
Gain of function isn't a conspiracy. It's research methodology.
We still don't know for a fact what happened. Lab leak seems incredibly plausible, but we need more data to understand.
If lab leak is what happened, then this is likely a case of best intentions that went horribly awry. Your response is far too extreme and discounts the failure modes that may have been more likely.
Researchers in the US wanted to conduct gain of function research but couldn't due to the legislative environment.
China has a ton of novel coronaviruses in local wildlife reservoirs that do cause disease and can evolve to impact humans. These are worth studying.
An arrangement could have been made to study these viruses with research objectives laid out by Western scientists. That's not bioweapons research. That's basic science.
The Wuhan lab may not have been equipped with the same safety protocols, enabling the virus to escape. Here's something we'd still need to find out.
What we need to look at is the cause of failure and prevent it from happening again. If rules were broken, then a handful of individuals may be responsible for unleashing this. (Overzealous Western researchers and Chinese lab personnel.)
This is geopolitically complicated and all parties involved are trying to save face. China and the US included. Not to mention every government that was slow to act in stopping the spread.
This is maybe human error. Lots of human error. If this is the case, it's historically notable as probably one of the greatest mistakes in human history. It cost millions of lives.
Through the same lens, it's also interesting to see all of the positive changes. RNA vaccines, remote work, supply chain discoveries, etc.
It’s also possible that a PRC agency or individual decided to take advantage of the situation and leak it to try and stick it to the United States as a geopolitical move.
I hope this isn’t true, but until we have additional evidence it would be impossible to rule this out entirely. Also the PRC needs to show that evidence to the world ASAP.
For some reason the media wants to call everyone that looks at the situation xenophobic and racist, which just leads me to believe there is more to the story.
Google isn't trying to arbiter truth, it's a combination of doing what China tells them to do and not being the arbiter of truth by removing almost anything related to covid. Simply discussing it can get you demonitized or your video removed.
So what? What are you suggesting?
Since this is blatantly false, I would ban this as misinformation if it happened in a place I moderated. I'm don't care if it's about China, I care about not enabling misinformation. If people want conspiracy theories, there are friendly forums they could visit, but they want them in serious forums too.
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/15/1016436749/who-chief-wuhan-la...
They don't have solid evidence to disprove a lab leak. Disproving is a lot harder that proving.
I must concede that your statement wasn't blatantly false, but it uses weasel language to appear more truthful than it is.
I agree, but I don't trust any central authority (especially the government!) to do that for me.
Educating people & empowering them to make this call is a much more ethical, and fruitful, endeavor.
To loosely paraphrase Mark Twain (I believe?): Just because a toddler can't use a sharp knife doesn't mean that I have to use a butter knife to cut my steak.
That's a great quote, only we're the toddler. For all its political failings, the WHO is brutally more knowledgeable about the subject that us, and less biased than our local governments. They're asking China to open up so they can discard/prove a lab leak. If China refuses, the lab leak possibility remains on the table no matter its likelihood.
Weaseling the phrasing, one can give the impression that the WHO turned around and now thinks the lab leak is the most likely source, while they still consider the natural origin most likely.
There are no signs that it might be man made. There are no signs that it might have evolved in GoF research. But the WIV had a sample of a close ancestor of this virus, it's not crazy that someone got the bug and jumped out in that very same city.
So you may do selection on virions that target better certain receptors in certain human cells to infect them, and that's useful to know of possible evolutions of a wild virus, but in parallel it might be losing environmental resistance (temperature range, UV light), or maybe damage the expression of some vital protein, or become too pathogenic and die along with the host.
By all means, one could try to perform GoF in live humans to ensure there's no LoF, but that limits enourmously the speed of the research, plus it's usually forbidden to experiment in humans these days.