State is mainly concerned with public order as far as I can tell. What you call "State censorship" I call State asking politely CEOs who are in the same social

State is mainly concerned with public order as far as I can tell. What you call "State censorship" I call State asking politely CEOs who are in the same social class as most politicians to stop the spreading of (alledgedly false) rumors. And rumors, howevever false, have often cause a great deal of social unrest. The reason it happens now and it did not happen it 2001... Well had you heard of Youtube in 2001 ? Facebook ? Probably not, I know I didn't. All powers have somewhat regulated information, the US is a society where you can say almost anything except calling people to go and kill ${group). I haven't heard of a lab-leak these proponent having been arrested, nor websites taken down etc... This my friend is state censorship. Now if your concern is that most media is owned by billionaires and private law is law on their platform, well ok, but that's another concern. > Also people blaming people eating "bat soup" has nothing to do with lab leak theory. Both are totally different issues altogether. I don't see how they are related? Because the bat soup people where the first one to jump on the lab-leak theory. That did not help the cause. We use network of trust to digest information. I don't have no trust in people saying crazy stuff even though they might sometimes be right. > Exactly. But having a debate now is mostly useless anyways. Whatever window of opportunity we had to investigate lab leak theory is now long gone. All the actors who wanted to cover their tracks have now had enough time to do so. So even if you are able to prove that lab leak did occur (to some degree) it won't lead to any indictments. And with an authoritarian CCP, good luck getting any leads directly from the labs itself. I don't agree. It didn't matter more at the time to know if it was a lab-leak or not, situation had to be handled. Now that there's less urgency maybe we can investigate the dark corners and do something about it so it won't happen again. It m atters more than ever. > Most post COVID conspiracy theories have actually come true. Be it mask mandates, lockdowns, GoF, harmful vaccine side effects or lab leak theories How are mask mandates and lockdowns conspiracists predictions turned true... ? The real conspiracy was not telling people they should wear masks to protect others because there wasn't enought for everybody. How was lockdown a conspiracy rather that government trying to pretend they were doing something ? I don't think the economy benefited fromt that\ Harmful vaccine side effects ? What about getting covid side-effects ? Listen you would have caught it no matter what and it would probably be worse. The discrepancy between deaths of vaccinated and unvaccinated people should tell you much. GOF was known before too, it just wasn't in the public eye