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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

Remember when posting the lab leak hypothesis on Facebook would get you banned and now it's, as best as we can figure, the most plausible theory?

There is no human run group fit to decide what is or is not "disinformation".

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In fact, most of the "people are dying because they're injecting themselves with horse dewormer" story can be traced back to a rolling stone article that quoted a doctor who said so. The only problem was, they actually quoted the doctor's name as well as an actual hospital he supposedly worked at - and the hospital issued a statement that that doctor neither worked there nor had they treated any Ivermectin overdoses (https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/rolling-stone-s-ive...). In other words, "people overdosing on horse dewormer" is actual misinformation... which isn't being censored.

Relying on one source for information is wrong, the hearsay article which reported what the doc in Oklahoma said without verifying the claims about ivermectin overdoses was wrong.

What is not wrong is this:

According to the National Poison Data System (NPDS), which collects information from the nation's 55 poison control centers, there was a 245% jump in reported exposure cases from July to August — from 133 to 459.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

On the one hand, it's nice to know this number is low, on the other hand the numbers are likely under-reporting. Low toxicity doses and symptoms are likely unrecorded. Self medication with prescription drugs is a bad idea.

No. The Rolling Stone debacle literally just happened.

The idea "most of the story" is traced backed to one bad article, from two days ago, when it's been a story for over a month is ridiculous nut-picking.

Ahem, I believe that's "nitpicking". b^)

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking

Thanks!

To be fair, the bans usually were about china fabricating the virus on purpose and releasing it with intention, accompanied by racism against Asians. This is pretty different from the accidental leak of a research-object, which is now the accepted theory.

The media did themselves and the public a disservice by gluing the two theories together and blending them. Several friends - college educated, intelligent professionals - were confused enough to approach and ask me about the lab leak/release theories.

The intentional lab release theory is the stuff of nonsense conspiracy theories. The accidental leak theory has always had some support but is now more widely accepted (but will likely never have hard proof).

For a time, both were bannable offenses on Facebook, Youtube and others. Likely because the media glued them together and assigned them both as "disinformation".

It wasn't really the media doing that. It was more a combination between nut heads, meme heads with their umbrella-connection and the first panic. The media just amplified it and rode the wave, as usual. And after the message was out, it was hard to turn it around. And I guess the platforms were just unable to distinguish between them, as also had more interest to wait till the nutty wave died down.

> It wasn't really the media doing that.

[1] - https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2021/06/covid-la...

[2] - https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/21/politics/coronavirus-lab-theo...

[3] - https://www.politifact.com/li-meng-yan-fact-check/

Not sure what you mean. These articles are all from 6+ months after the first panic. At that point, the theories were already long merged and spreading wild. They were already present from the first days in January 2020, when China's situation became epidemic. And this didn't really change till spring 2021 when everyone cooled down a bit and sanity returned a bit.

On YouTube and Facebook, "the media" is just "stuff people are saying in videos they post."

So this point reduces to "both were bannable offenses because people were posting videos that glued them together," which... Yes, that's why.

> To be fair, the bans usually were about china fabricating the virus on purpose and releasing it with intention, accompanied by racism against Asians. This is pretty different from the accidental leak of a research-object, which is now the accepted theory.

No, both versions were lumped into the same bucket.

"most plausible theory" according to whom? It's not a theory, it's a hypothesis with little tangible but evidence due to the nature of chinas control. It could have happened, it may not have. The problem with lab leak discussion on YouTube/Facebook is it was heavily associated with politics, and incredible unsubstantiated claims. "Experts" from nowhere, hired degrees talking about a lab they know nothing about, anonymous and convenient unheard of "researchers" supposedly "exposing the lab leak". The disinformation was incredible. Even if lab leak did happen - very few had the actual proof or good arguments to back it.

It became 'plausible' based on fashion -- the evidence didn't change at all. Which is even crazier.

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