4 ms·

I find it deeply disturbing that excuses as flimsy as "hate" or "possible hate crime reaction" would be used as justification to suppress the truth, especially

I find it deeply disturbing that excuses as flimsy as "hate" or "possible hate crime reaction" would be used as justification to suppress the truth, especially with a situation as grave as COVID-19. Who is to say whether the uptick with Asians is causation and not just correlation? Meanwhile, thousands of Americans were dying daily during the peak of the pandemic. Everyone was scared, needed to know what was going on. The average person was much more worried about the potential harm to millions of citizens than a much smaller uptick in one particular sector. It's of paramount importance that we don't repeat the mistakes that led to the pandemic in the first place. The only way we can do that is getting to the bottom of what happened. If "possible Asian hate crimes" was the best excuse that the censorship industrial complex could come up with, then it is clear to me that any excuse would have done, and the conclusions I draw is that the suppression was 100% politically motivated. I want to know who was involved in making the decision to suppress, and to what ends they were trying to shape public opinion. At the minimum I want to know who I should be working to vote out of office. How can I know who to vote for when we're normalizing lying as a justifiable policy up and down the chain of government communication and mass media?

rtkwe 3y ago
It wasn't just the lab leak theory going around though, it was extremely tightly coupled with the "COVID bioweapon" conspiracy which really tainted it especially in the early days when there really wasn't much more info available other than it was first detected as a big outbreak in the same city as the coronavirus lab. In an ideal situation they'd be separable but they were so closely deployed trying to address the bioweapon conspiracy caught a lot of less out there discussion of the lab leak. Also important though is it never really went away. For all the talk of censorship and suppression the possibility of a lab leak never left the investigation. It's also a very difficult thing to investigate without access to the labs to see what strains they were working on looked like which we still don't have afaik. It's been a process of eliminating other possiblities to some extent as other vectors that could be looked into were and turned out to be less likely.
- lordfrito 3y ago
  > Also important though is it never really went away. Sort of true -- but only because you can't kill the idea, the need to find the cause of the pandemic to avoid a repeat. This is cold comfort to the people who were getting banned had their accounts cancelled for suggesting things that turned out to be actually true. There's was a lot of collateral damage here, all in the name of... well I'm not sure. Trust is hard to build, and once broken takes a long time to regain. The point is, as a society we're heading in the wrong direction. Freedom of speech is becoming freedom for those who keep their mouths shut.

rtkwe 3y ago

It wasn't just the lab leak theory going around though, it was extremely tightly coupled with the "COVID bioweapon" conspiracy which really tainted it especially in the early days when there really wasn't much more info available other than it was first detected as a big outbreak in the same city as the coronavirus lab. In an ideal situation they'd be separable but they were so closely deployed trying to address the bioweapon conspiracy caught a lot of less out there discussion of the lab leak. Also important though is it never really went away. For all the talk of censorship and suppression the possibility of a lab leak never left the investigation. It's also a very difficult thing to investigate without access to the labs to see what strains they were working on looked like which we still don't have afaik. It's been a process of eliminating other possiblities to some extent as other vectors that could be looked into were and turned out to be less likely.

lordfrito 3y ago
> Also important though is it never really went away. Sort of true -- but only because you can't kill the idea, the need to find the cause of the pandemic to avoid a repeat. This is cold comfort to the people who were getting banned had their accounts cancelled for suggesting things that turned out to be actually true. There's was a lot of collateral damage here, all in the name of... well I'm not sure. Trust is hard to build, and once broken takes a long time to regain. The point is, as a society we're heading in the wrong direction. Freedom of speech is becoming freedom for those who keep their mouths shut.