The mistakes that were made need correction. Don't advertise diversity, live up to it.
Additionally, I think you should consider the fact that facebook simply is not a great venue for discussing such things. They cannot tell fraud from fact, don't have a process for doing so, and instead have social dynamics that encourage irrational conspiracies. What exactly should have been done? I get that they certainly ban the wrong things at time, but the real problem here is the platform, which kind of makes it inevitable that either that happens, or that misinformation spreads like wildfire.
But really: the moment to allow a public discussion like that to come to it's own (unguided) conclusions is not in the initial chaos of uncertainty. The consequences of uninformed, unmoderated speculation running wild are still visible everywhere. On the one hand, mostly everybody accepts that healthy debate is a useful social tool, but on the other hand the current zeitgeist is one in which we've not socially learned to distinguish between the right to shout whatever we feel is truthy from the wisdom of relying on that to form public opinion.
Clearly, mistakes were made - but we need to consider the alternative to partially incorrect guidance by experts, which is sometimes extremely dangerous widely and deeply held beliefs formed by social media echo chambers.
Hopefully future generations will have better habits when it comes to dealing with this kind of information overload, and a greater ability to put one's own suspicions in perspective relative to experts, but that's clearly not an easy task. We don't know who to trust, why to trust them; we do our own research, but poorly and with terribly limited resources; we trust others that appear to be like us without having a way to really judge how great their interpretations are nor to recognize which are flawed, and all this is spiced up by the fact that some of these beliefs about facts blur into deeply held moral axioms - which we as a society don't universally share, leading to easily exploitable deep divisions.
...so, while it's deeply unfortunate that your potentially valid observations were silenced, I'm not sure I really believe the alternative would have been better, on facebook.
On a personal level, I find this story to be more of a funny (tragic?) anecdote than a degrading violation of rights. What does it say about the direction our society is headed? Facebook is the only public forum where I (or any of most people) could have significant reach in this discussion.
Letter to the editor? Couldn't have gotten it published at the time. My Slack groups of highly-educated, economically powerful friends and acquaintances? Sure, and through those channels we all had access to much better curated information than any official channel. Friends and family? You bet. Local Reddit groups? Sure, all of the 30 people who read it.
This isn't only an issue regarding times of crisis. Access to precise information in matters big and small is increasingly filtered through similar mechanisms. Economic decisions, career advice, knowledge of how to best position oneself in the world and so on. All trends channel these advantages to a smaller and smaller elite that is capable of making sense of the world, where finding the useful truths in a sea of uncertain signals is increasingly difficult.
I'm not really suggesting a solution, rather pointing out that this is an insidious challenge with great potential to cause strife if we can't figure out a way to properly democratize it. It works well if you're really smart or well-connected. Not so much otherwise.
> this is a propaganda instrument
What exactly is this "propaganda instrument"? Just trying to latch on to what you're trying to suggest.
There might have been lies, distortions of the truth, misunderstandings, assumptions, ignorance, but "propaganda" implies some kind of motive and objective by a particular actor or set of actors.
With perhaps the exception of parties responsible hiding any remnants of the truth in order to avoid blame (aka a cover up), what was the motive/objective and by whom?
For me, the purpose of the lab in China and the possibility of a contagion leak makes complete sense with no conspiracy theories needed. Even the Chinese Government/CCPs response makes sense (not defending it, just obvious based on their track record).
I can imagine multiple ways in which the resulting pandemic could be used as an instrument to cause and inflict political harm in order benefit rivals or perhaps entire states and regimes. But the only way I can describe what has actually resulted is an all out frenzy and turmoil.
Speculation about motives is difficult, my most prominent idea is that a subset of scientists agreed it was better to craft a noble lie than to be transparent with their ideas. Repeating a lie often enough so that people believe it to be true is a law of propaganda.
> lies, distortions of the truth, misunderstandings, assumptions, ignorance
I don't see how a "distortion of the truth" has less requirements for a motive than propaganda. What do you believe was the motivation to distort the truth? If you have an idea I would gladly entertain it. I don't think "misunderstanding" fits the case where people were targeted for dissenting views.
> a contagion leak makes complete sense with no conspiracy theories needed
Yes indeed, this would not have needed any conspiracies at all, but we got one for political reasons as the "official" message was crafted to deny the possibility of a leak outright by a subset of the scientific community. For personal gratification or just to calm the public or any other reason is of secondary importance here. The fact remains that there were attempts to suppress such views.
> the resulting pandemic could be used as an instrument to cause and inflict political harm in order benefit rivals or perhaps entire states and regimes.
The problem is the lack of transparency and intentional lies, this is off topic.
If it was an accident, there must be consequences for research like this. Maybe it has to be disallowed, perhaps more security is needed. I can see how such measures might run counter to the interest of the group that came up with the idea to neglect that possibility. Just to make it very clear, that is speculation about a motive and is not substantiated. Substantiated was the lack of truthful information.
I think you're missing that the lack of access to facts was a willful manipulation of the geography the "debate" took place on, which shows just what an effective strategy it was.
There's nothing ill-founded, it was then and is now the most reasonable and plausible explanation for the outbreak. You can do the same back of the envelope calculation today that I did 2 years ago, and nothing has made it less valid:
1. There's 100 cities in PRC with >1 million inhabitants.
2. There's one (1) lab in PRC doing work on bat viruses.
The probability that the outbreak happened in the same city as the one with the lab by pure coincidnce is therefore about 1%.
That's not a proof, that's not a definite argument, that's just evaluating how plausible the hypothesis is. You can tweak the values to be more charitable if you want, say note that Wuhan is a large city and we shouldn't count smaller ones, or point out that there might be a few mor labs doing the same kind of work but with less prominence. That merely lowers the lab leak's plausibility to 50%. I.e very plausible.
But when you take specific bits of evidence out of the great soup surrounding this and highlight them, it's really easy to draw the wrong conclusions, or to get the feeling that this bit of evidence simply due to familiarity is more trustworthy than some other evidence. And we also have biases towards evidence we understand, which kind of makes sense, but is also a problem, as non-experts...
If we try to make a rough calculation from an unknowledgeable starting position, it might be more reasonable to say "just as likely to come from each 1M+ city as to come from each lab [of which there is one]". Then, if we didn't know the geographic origin, the lab probability is ~1% ( = 1/(100 cities + 1 lab)), but knowing the geographic start point you'd get 50%
P(this lab given Wuhan) = P(Wuhan given this lab) * P(lab) / P(Wuhan)
P(this lab given Wuhan) = 1 [this lab is in Wuhan!] * (1/101) / (2/101)
But that means people must be able to propose ill-founded hypotheses. They'll be proposing tons of them as they try to separate fact from fiction!
In an idealized world you might do this in the open. Unfortunately, media outlets and social media including hacker news will take things out of context, as both the telegraph and this very discussion is doing right now. That's simply not a valid interpretation of the participants opinions and their confidence in them. Selectively quoting "experts" while they're still forming their interpretation of the data is misleading, because it removed the whole point of expertise; the reason you trust such expert opinion is because it is informed, and the social contract here is that experts should refrain from misusing their authority when they're not sure of their conclusions. And most generally do that to maintain their reputation.
So what to make of this? I think this could simply be part of a normal healthy debate; one that never saw the light of day simply because (a) evidence was lacking, and alternative explanations (e.g. of that furin cleavage site) emerged, and (b) given the lack of evidence and the unfortunate impossibility to express a nuanced opinion and have it be interpreted by the public correctly due to the charged atmosphere at the time, many chose simply not to speak.
That's not to say there aren't a few people that probably acted in bad faith, but the vast majority looks perfectly reasonable to me. And if we want to avoid this in the future, we need to have an atmosphere where nuance is expressible; otherwise you simply can't expect people to open up about potentially explosive hypotheses that they themselves don't even really support but cannot rule out; the damage to their reputation and to society would be too large.