A swath of media acts like the biggest victims of COVID were people who speculated that it leaked from a lab and received replies on social media like “no evidence, conspiracy theorist, stop it” instead of “I doubt it, the epidemiological evidence indicates otherwise, but can’t totally rule it out.”
This seems like kind of a big story and it's frustrating that we're still getting "it's time for liberals to consider the lab leak" think pieces. The two best pieces of "evidence" come directly from the Trump Administration and have completely fallen apart under scrutiny!
A significant factor in What Went Wrong is that the people in position to shape the information environment by highlighting what’s important decided that who said what to whom on social media about something was more important than the thing itself, in part because doing so centered themselves.
Speculation based on at best circumstantial evidence that goes against expert opinion based on the assumption that direct evidence doesn’t exist because They must be covering it up is conspiracy theorizing.
And, I’m sorry, but some were too mean when Nate Silver or whoever did it ≠ important news.
“The libs on social media were wrong, look at these tweets, gotcha!”
I don’t think that’s news nearly as much as pro media does. But this was “the libs were probably right, but weren’t nice about it.”
Notice how they don’t run tons of “stop disrespecting epidemiologists” pieces. Only lab leakers.
May 11, 2025 16:37One good thing about twitter turning into X and a toxic cesspool is that I’m seeing less and less MSM articles that are very clearly just summaries of what happened on Twitter that day. It was starting to get a bit ridiculous.
