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Comment by deorder | Hacker News Reader

/r/Wuhan_Flu

More info here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jqbx/reddit-cant-quarantin...

Also here: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/f6jpm7/what_i...

And a quote from /r/OutOfTheLoop about /r/WuhanFlu:

> The users of that subreddit believe in a conspiracy that the Wuhan Coronavirus is more serious than the governments of China and the United States are telling them. They believe the government is mismanaging the outbreak. They were quarantined because an admin believed the subreddit was spreading misinformation.

Note that /r/WuhanFlu was already talking about this mismanagement since mid-January.

Unfortunately @apostacy (who is getting downvoted) is from what I experienced back then mostly right.

View on HN

thank you hadn't heard of this. the quarantine process really works huh

It mostly destroyed that subreddit-community and prevented anything from that subreddit to ever reach the frontpage again. It is now just a shell of its former self. Back then it helped me and others to stock up on masks, sanitizers and other stuff early. We warned other people early about the upcoming virus as well.

Meanwhile the other corona-subreddits were and/or still are controlled by moderators that also control many of the other largest Reddit-approved (corona-)subreddits:

https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1582202873483.jpg (Sorry, this 4chan archive of the image is all I could still find)

And this is all just one example of how crazy things can get and not even the worst (like people getting doxxed and personally harassed, getting banned on multiple sites en masse etc.). Many people who aren't in the right place at the right time within certain communities probably can't even imagine things like this could happen (like I couldn't 6 years ago) until it happens to them. They just call you a "conspiracy theorist". Not everyone who is skeptical of the mainstream story believes in "flat earth", is "anti-vaxx", thinks they want to "inject us with microchips" and "control us with 5G". Those are used as an example to censor and/or discredit other alternative views.

All we did on that subreddit was just trying to find out what was happening before everyone was talking about it (which was suspicious in itself).

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