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Comment by asutekku | Hacker News Reader

That screenshot is from /pol/ so I'm curious if the complaints about "censorship" were that people couldn't call it a china flu.

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Of course, because for some reason this is suddenly unacceptable but it is ok to have an Indian variant or a Brazilian variant.

There's a semantic difference with "X virus" and "Y variant". "X virus" denotes the virus was caused by country X and is behind it all, whereas "Y variant" denotes it was mutated in there but is not the root cause of it all.

But yet “Havana Syndrome” is freely used everywhere.

Yeah, at a certain point back in 2020 it suddenly was very bad to have variants with geographic origin in the naming. Although that was how it had been done in many other cases.

I don't think that's true. West Nile Virus wasn't caused by people West of the Nile, the Spanish Flu wasn't caused by Spain, MERS is called that because it was discovered in the Middle East, not because people in the Middle East caused it, etc. The form "X virus" does not at all imply that the virus was caused by X.

Then, of course, there is the very real possibility that China literally did cause the virus.

Doubt the people in the countries who are associated with those variants appreciate your semantic parsing.

I don't think there is so much, the distinction between "caused by" and "discovered there" escapes most people in casual use

Imho the reason this time it was different with terms like "China flu" is not that it's generally unacceptable to nickname an illness by it's region of first discovery, but that Trump was actively using this terminology to push an agenda

That's also considered unacceptable, and the reason variants are now assigned sequential names from the phonetic alphabet, hence "Delta Variant".

Zika

Ebola

Lyme

MERS

West Nile Virus

Marburg Virus

Guinea Worm

German Measles

Ross River Fever

Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever

Norovirus

Or for a complete list of thousands, simply look up toponymic diseases

German measles is more commonly called rubella

2015: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/discovered-disease-w...

> The World Health Organization (WHO) mostly works to reduce the physical toll of disease. But last week it turned to another kind of harm: the insult and stigma inflicted by diseases named for people, places, and animals. Among the existing monikers that its new guidelines “for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases” would discourage: Ebola, swine flu, Rift Valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and monkey pox.

Spanish flu...

is an excellent example of why that kind of naming is stupid, given that it likely first appeared in the US and primarily became known as "spanish" because Spain (not being at war) was actually talking about it instead of censoring reports about it.

I heard the terms "corona" and "covid" long before the term "china flu"

I remember seeing links to reveddit, a site I made, over this. A competing subreddit claimed censorship [1] by posting low-res screenshots of removed posts [2]. It was just a way to drum up support for their own subreddit. The screenshots were misleading because every subreddit with any history has tons of removed posts, and that's the default view on reveddit. I'm 99% sure most users understood this right away though.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Wuhan_Flu/comments/ev6yhy/the_new_s...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/kL8I8qy.png

Do you think Wuhan_Flu (the creator/mods) had/has bad intentions? At the time it was one of the few subs where you could talk about things you couldn't talk about in other subs (info leaking out from China regarding the virus). That sub was quarantined for spreading misinformation and fearmongering which someone at /r/OutOfTheLoop summarized as:

> 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.

They may well have believed what they shared. In this case, other subs were not removing more content, despite the claims [1], and it was simple to verify.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jqbx/reddit-cant-quarantin...

Thank you. Really appreciate your input. I did read that Vice article before and recently shared it here as well.

From what I remember at the time /r/coronavirus and /r/china_flu removed any discussion about "leaks" (or were they?) from China. On the other hand, not all the "leaks" discussed in /r/Wuhan_Flu turned out to be what they seemed (videos of people "dropping dead" on the streets etc.).

> Thank you. Really appreciate your input. I did read that Vice article before and recently shared it here as well.

Sure thing.

> From what I remember at the time /r/coronavirus and /r/china_flu removed any discussion about "leaks" (or were they?) from China.

I'm no expert on the content. I only know that the amount of posts removed as shown on reveddit is going to look the same at first glance regardless of what subreddit you are looking at. As for which topics were removed, someone could do a research project on that.

> On the other hand, not all the "leaks" discussed in /r/Wuhan_Flu turned out to be what they seemed (videos of people "dropping dead" on the streets etc.).

I agree and think the top comment on that OOTL post you referenced gives a more balanced view of what was going on [1],

> For background, everyone agrees the outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019 is an easily spread, relatively lethal [edit: relatively lethal compared to influenza], brand new virus. Unfortunately, outside that, details are very sparse and major organizations WHO, CDC are non-committal about predictions.

> Since “official” details are very sparse, true details are emerging outside official channels along with a whole lot of conspiracy theorizing. The two are extremely mixed at this point. A quick review showed the sub in question contains all levels. For example, excellent NEJM articles showing that the virus can spread prior to symptoms interspersed with video footage of a bunch of black birds flying into China because they can apparently smell all the dead bodies.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/f6jpm7/what_i...

Yeah, that sounds about right. The point is that this sub allowed for free discussion about the virus and what was happening in China / Wuhan at a time when not many people were talking about it or knew what was going on. This indeed included "leaked" videos from China of people in hasmat suits, suddenly falling to the ground, spraying streets and buildings etc. It was alarming (in the end I think those videos were created to misdirect).

Those videos were only a small part of the discussion going on there. Quarantining the sub acted for many only as confirmation that certain information was really being suppressed from higher up.

As I said here before. Because of this sub I bought N95 masks early on (some of which I later gave to doctors/nurses in my family), stocked up on food and warned others to stock up before the panic set in. Every once in a while I posted the latest numbers and estimations of the CFR/IFR. The last one I did which was on /r/coronavirus turned out to be accurate a year later. Sadly /r/Wuhan_Flu is now only a shell of its former self.

Later many things turned out to be true as well. All subs were guilty of spreading information which later turned out to not be the case. I really do not like censorship and want to hear from all sides. Luckily there is the website you created, reveddit.

> Luckily there is the website you created, reveddit.

Thanks for saying so. It builds on top of similar work. I think there will always be a way to review what gets removed. And as we use more social media with opaque moderation it may become standard practice to check whether your posts are "live" or not.

Why would you be banned by a moderator of /r/China_Flu for calling it China flu?

From the subreddit sidebar:

> The name r/China_Flu was created at a time when SARS-CoV-2 had not been named and was only affecting China. Subreddit names cannot be changed after they are created. This subreddit is a place to discuss the 2019 Wuhan-originated novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, called COVID-19.

What the screenshot shows is that only a handful of mods were running all major coronavirus related subs. /r/China_Flu is a major coronavirus related subreddit endorsed and promoted by Reddit themselves. Originally the image is not coming from 4chan.

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