The lab leak hypothesis was also pretty tightly coupled with the bioweapon/intentional release theory which is part of why it received so much push back.
Also I don't recall the specific fact check messages but if they were in line with "there's no hard evidence of a lab leak" I'd say that's still pretty accurate.
The owner of a service has no requirement or duty to carry anyone's speech. A person's freedom of speech doesn't override anyone else's freedom of association. So a private company can censor or reject any speech using their service unless otherwise mandated by law (common carrier etc).
Large platforms (twitter, YouTube, etc) banning views that they don’t agree with gives them power to truly shape society by controlling acceptable discourse.
What they deem outright information may in fact be true. And even allowing clear misinformation (1+1=3) is important. We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it. Using 1+1=3 analogy, wouldn’t you want people to rally around tooling people to learn math?
It's inflammatory, outright disinformation, outright misinformation, or just something the service owner doesn't want to carry. Discussion a lab leak hypothesis is not the same as claiming COVID leaked from a bioweapon laboratory or was intentionally leaked for <reasons>.
That being said, social media sites flagging posts is very different from outright censorship. It's not uncommon for someone to actually get censored/removed from a site claiming its censorship over discussing some topic when really it was a history of dipshit behavior and flagrant TOS violations.
so, the vast majority of social media then? what makes this issue so special? why did all of the major social media networks censor/"flag" anyone publicly speculating only certain speculations about this issue?
> The lab leak hypothesis was also pretty tightly coupled with the bioweapon/intentional release theory which is part of why it received so much push back.
No it wasn't. The media often takes the most extreme case in order to denigrate the whole side that they don't like.
A lot of what I saw were channels pushing both at the same time. An accidental leak of an attempted bioweapon or something like that was pretty popular in some circles.
Also I don't recall the specific fact check messages but if they were in line with "there's no hard evidence of a lab leak" I'd say that's still pretty accurate.