I am so tired of seeing this crap. Here is what happened:

Act I: there was no solid evidence as to where COVID originated. There was speculation of various kinds ranging from transmission from a bat cave via wet markets, to lab leak at a Wuhan lab, to it being a bio weapon. Nobody had solid evidence though people started digging.

Act II: a group of pundits and conservative political operatives who were already known to be liars and blowhards latched onto the lab leak theory. It just so happened that it was politically advantageous for the GOP to push anti-Chinese sentiment at the time and a lab leak theory would point the finger directly at the Chinese government. They presented no evidence and had no evidence. They started spreading this theory along with various online groups all known for spreading disinformation. The clear undertone of this message was a call for violence against Asian Americans.

Act III: in reaction to the calls for violence tech companies started curbing spread of this message. Remember some of the other things these same people were saying: that COVID was fake and invented by the US government to keep us indoors while they installed 5G towers everywhere to control our minds; that staying home and wearing masks was designed to weaken our immune systems to prepare for some kind of bio weapon attack; that Bill Gates was using vaccines to implant trackers in every arm of every individual around the world; that the mRNA vaccines are designed to let Pfizer and Moderna copyright or trademark your DNA such that they own you and you become their slave; that nobody actually was dying from COVID and this was a massive coverup designed to make Trump look bad.

Act IV: evidence had emerged that the lab leak theory might have credibility. The tech companies lifted the filtering efforts.

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Note that this is in no way different than if I tell you that lizard people from Mars run the US government and you tell me to shut the fuck up. I might be right and maybe evidence later shows up that in fact lizard people form Mars do run the US government, but since I have no evidence at the moment this is just bullshit at best and a call for insurrection at worst. Even a broken clock it right twice a day and when liars say something there is less than neutral reason to trust what they say. When mostly liars are frothing at the mouth spreading a theory, well it sure walks, talks, and sounds like a conspiracy theory. Had the people spreading the lab leak theory initially taken the time to do proper research and present any kind of shred of evidence then maybe it would have been treated differently. But as is they had no credibility to begin with, so is it that surprising that what they had to say was treated as lies, especially given their clear conflict of interest?

And yes I am aware of individual incidents of various investigators being hampered by their higher ups from looking into the lab leak theory. I read those stories in nuance and what I gleamed is that it was (a) partly incompetence and (b) partly reactionary to the bullshit that the talking heads on TV were spreading. Maybe what we should focus on is holding the talking heads on TV to some standard of reality and these things won't happen instead of crying "censorship!" when someone calls for violence against an ethnic group based on unsubstantiated (at least at the time and still currently not proven) theory.