With Mr. Trump sneering about “kung flu” and “China virus,” it was easy to write off a lab-leak hypothesis as a right-wing fantasy. The MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace called it “one of Trumpworld’s most favorite conspiracy theories.” Twitter added warning labels to posts that argued for lab leak; Facebook banned such posts altogether for several months in 2021 before reversing the decision. NPR called it a “baseless conspiracy theory” in a tweet, and the foreign affairs expert Fareed Zakaria wrote (and repeated on CNN): “The far right has now found its own virus conspiracy theory.”
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The country is awash in propaganda and manipulative fakery.
Related on the SLP
But trying to clean up disinformation by quashing ideas that somebody — a government employee, an academic think tank, a social media team — deems undesirable? This creates its own dangers. I’ve spent too many years in censored countries like Egypt, Russia and China to believe that our disinformation problem can be solved by monitoring speech and sorting out acceptable from unacceptable ideas. You end up in a society where nobody really believes anything.
