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Comment by phpisthebest | Hacker News Reader

People were being banned from twitter, youtube, facebook ext for mentioning lab leak... Now you want to gas light everyone saying "it was perfectly ok to talk about in 2020

That is not accurate at all...

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> Facebook made a quiet but dramatic reversal last week: It no longer forbids users from touting the theory that COVID-19 came from a laboratory.

> "In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps," the social media platform declared in a statement.

> [...]

> Consider that Facebook's new declaration sits atop its About page, just above the site's previous policy on coronavirus-related misinformation—dated February 8, 2021—which was to vigorously purge so-called "false claims," including the notion that the disease "is man-made or manufactured." The mainstream media had deemed this notion not merely wrong but dangerously absurd, and tech companies followed suit, suppressing it to the best of their abilities.

https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-...

I remember learning a lot of the reasoning behind why I thought it was most likely a lab leak from a video I got as a top recommendation on youtube from a rather large channel that had near or over a million views at the time, so anecdotally I think perhaps a lot of the people who got banned for their discussion on the topic were either grouped up with people positing more extreme possibilities, or just an example of over reach. Either way, I personally don't remember people presenting the possibility of a lab leak being shredded (at least on youtube, I can't speak for the other platforms as I use them very infrequently).

Do you have any examples of someone who was banned simply for saying it could have leaked, as opposed to lying about it being a man-made bio weapon? The latter was common in right-wing circles because it excused their leaders’ incompetent handling of the pandemic and scientists pretty quickly established there weren’t signs of genetic modification, but throughout the process there were people discussing the possibility of a sample leaking through a lab safety failure.

It was facebook[1] stated policy to prevent all discussion, so even if there was not a user level bann they were removing all posts and discussions about it

Twitter banned lots people for it (and other COVID "misinformation") it would be hard to point to a perfect example as often people that wanted to discuss lab leak also talked about masking, masking policy, vaccine efficacy, and Vaccine mandate policies. All of which were also forbidden topics. If you dared to speak out against "The Experts" at the cdc or WHO then you were either shadow-banned (i.e posts hidden, de-ranked, etc) or outright banned

[1] https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-...

Not everyone is terminally online mate. My experience mirrors theirs, lots of speculation and jokingly considering the various conspiracies at the time.

Bioweapon was definitely one of the options that was boosted by china's outlandishly overreacting at the start, welding people into their home etc

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