But to ignore that, of course authorities are going to label criticism as misinformation. Of course that's what happens. I was hoping we could tacitly assume that misinformation as denying clear vote outcomes, deliberately going against science and so on.
https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-re...
The people who were asking for transparecy were to be dismissed by the team under the "conspiracy theorist" label.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/why-proximal-origins-mu...
Ok, so the case is a pretty decent edge case. However, I wrote "deliberately going against science", which I don't see happening here. Here, people did more science disagreeing with other science (if you can call it that). In this case the first "research" seems to have an agenda and should indeed warrant criticism. And the criticism is good with data to back it up.
The same does not happen with climate denialists for example - just plain old misinformation with an agenda. They are free to publish papers, yet don't seem to be able to, at least with convincing results.
To put my point in short: I don't think we should call something that has data to back it up and the intention to get to the truth misinformation in the context of this discussion. Regardless how it's labelled by authorities.
It's hard to infer people's intention. Maybe I'm being naive but I think even flat earthers have the earnest intention of getting to the truth and use data and observations.
My algorithm to deal with untruth is engaging with everyone and asking for clarification/evidence. To me creating a blanket label for "people you should never listen to" is dangerous.
The implication of the above comment is that we cannot trust that any claim is misinformation, much less attempt to censor it, because cases of supposed misinformation in the past have turned out to be true. Obviously this is untrue, because actual disinformation and lies do exist, and it is possible to differentiate between them in most cases - even most controversial cases.
How? What do you say of the lab-leak hypothesis for COVID?
Also, while "lab leak theory" is often brought up as an example of "the truth" being censored (despite, AFAIK, there being no concrete evidence yet supporting it) it's worth noting that alternative COVID theories were never censored in any meaningful sense, even on mainstream social media. People discussed it, kept discussing it, and discuss it still. I will say I'm confident that when the facts come out one way or another, they will come from the scientific community, not randoms on the internet.
Even if this turns out to be a case of overcorrection by social media platforms (arguably an understandable case, given how much batshit insane stuff was going around back then) it's also a counter-argument to the premise that social media platforms or "Big Tech" control "the narrative" to any significant degree, or really act as the de facto "public square."