There was a time when you weren't allowed to say that the SARS-COV-2 might've leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. That's the most prominent, indefensible example of moderation gone awry and proof that the censorship model can be successfully abused by bad actors to suppress potentially valid opposing views. Imagine how many other issues have been suppressed but haven't reached the level of visibility that issue did.

You were absolutely allowed to say that, you just weren’t allowed to assert that it was definitely leaked from the lab. You’ve fallen for the false grievances pushed by blatant con men like Alex Berenson.

I don't know who Alex Berenson is or what he's said about this topic but another example you could use is "limiting the dissemination" of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which also has now returned to the news as a viable story despite being buried during the election cycle.

I don't really care about the details of these stories, it doesn't affect me if the virus came from a lab or how deep the corruption runs in the Biden family. But any rational person without a political agenda has to agree that the censorship system as it exists is ripe for abuse by bad actors. These two examples in particular completely changed my viewpoint on moderation and I no longer see Facebook or Twitter fighting "misinformation" as a good thing given how easily they can be manipulated into denying valid information. They simply cannot be trusted to identify what is or isn't misinformation.

If you are trying to come off as center and non-political why do you assert there's corruption in the Biden family and the only question is how much?

I think it's pretty widely accepted at this point that Hunter Biden repeatedly attempted to peddle the influence of his father for personal profit. Whether he was ever successful at influencing his father or whether his father participated is less clear, but the emails from his laptop don't paint an encouraging picture.

No one brought up the Clintons. Provide a source that proves your accusation about corruption with the Biden's

It is still under investigation (Hunter Biden's laptop is now acknowledged by the mainstream media in 2022). While not proof in the legal sense, oddities are easy to find:

https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HSGAC%20-%20Fin...

On April 16, 2014, Vice President Biden met with his son's business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Vice President Biden visited Ukraine, and he soon after was described in the press as the "public face of the administration's handling of Ukraine." The day after his visit, on April 22, Archer joined the board of Burisma. Six days later, on April 28, British officials seized $23 million from the London bank accounts of Burisma's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Fourteen days later, on May 12, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, and over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board.

Oddities aren't proof and the existence of a laptop isn't shocking. I own a laptop.

The op made an accusation as if it was a fact

Hunter Biden is utterly irrelevant.

For my part, I believe that large scale partisan cherry picking of facts is a terrible thing for free speech and democracy.

Any adult should have learnt that starting with a kernel of truth, or flooding the debate with accusations and demands, are effective methods to mislead and deceive people. It is a proven method for suppressing facts. It lacks integrity, and serves the goals of the corrupt.

It is strange to me that people perfectly aligned to the attack lines of corrupt politicians (in your case, the Republican flavour) bother pretending even to themselves that it is the corruption that really bothers them.

> It is strange to me that people perfectly aligned to the attack lines of corrupt politicians (in your case, the Republican flavour) bother pretending even to themselves that it is the corruption that really bothers them.

This is probably the most tribal thing I ever read here on hn.

So, I’m European, not American. I genuinely don’t care about your politics. My only interaction with it is news titles I inevitably run into. But I don’t have to be American, or Republican to notice your politicians ( and mine for that matter ) are deeply corrupt. From both sides. I think republicans are just as corrupt as democrats. I think Trump is just as corrupt as Biden as Clinton. I think they are all in it for themselves and will gladly sell their influence to the higher bidder, which is usually corporate interests.

And, yeah, I actually wish things were different. But they’re not. So all I’m left with is to point out how ridiculous people like themitigating are.

You made the accusation about Biden. I'm asking for a source that proves that accusation.

> You were absolutely allowed to say that...

... That may be true for Twitter, but it's certainly not the case for IG and FB. Discussion of any sort was off-limits, based pretty much entirely on Daszak's letter (we agree that's batshit insane, right?). Millions of posts were deleted, and tens of millions got a little warning bar that dropped interaction by "at least" 80%.

Meanwhile back at Twitter, people who tweeted wrong-think of very mild varieties, such as anything but the current and official (and ever-shifting) stance on vaccine effectiveness were getting banned. While that's not super cool, you're right to point out that Twitter weren't quite as authoritarian as claimed.

they were deleted because the point was to create a new reality regardless of the truth and they were politicized causing people to do the wrong things - become anti vaccination, protest masks and cause more harm and death - all on something that didn’t really matter because the facts don’t change on the reality of an unconfirmed source in which case it’s evident this is exactly your MO too.

> the point was to create a new reality regardless of the truth...

Some people did that, sure. Others were genuine. For example, this tweet in cautious favor of a new vaccine development got a Professor of haemostasis and thrombosis at the University of Sheffield banned, and even on appeal they made him delete the tweet: https://twitter.com/ProfMakris/status/1474068222550884367/ph...

Many, many other cases of this sort exist, and there's no justification for it. Speaking of unwarranted - your assumptions about people's motives, to justify attacking and censoring them, are disturbing. Do you feel like that's a normal thing to do?

Baseless racist accusations that led to multiple real-world violent attacks aren't "opposing views": they are blood libel.

You just put the problem into focus. Trump pushing the lab leak hypothesis and using the term "China virus" is indisputably a xenophobic dog whistle to a racist subset of his base. But that doesn't mean the lab leak hypothesis and any discussion of it is racist, and based on what's been uncovered since, it's certainly not a baseless accusation.

Trump has used this tactic effectively many times in the past: he says something that makes sense ("we need border security") in such a racist and distasteful way that causes the opposition to kneejerk react against whatever policy he's proposing, forcing them to take a position that's at odds with common sense ("border walls are racist!"). It's possible he may have had some classified information about the lab leak being a feasible story, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was just one of the thousands of things he blabbers uncontrollably about and this particular one luckily happened to have some truth to it.

You still can’t, apparently.

Citation needed.

It’ll be something about race

What do you mean?