The media's lab leak fiasco
<i>There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disagreement among researchers.</i><p>I think this part of the text really sums up everything I hated about reading the news and social media in 2020. Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. I don&#x27;t like being reminded of corporate sponsored social movements if I open facebook&#x2F;google&#x2F;amazon&#x2F;twitter. I don&#x27;t want my app reminding me to vote&#x2F;get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it without a way to dismiss and select &#x27;I already did, stop reminding me.&#x27; I don&#x27;t want reddit creating a central sub-page for discussing [Current Event] within the narrow bounds of what their moderators think is acceptable. I don&#x27;t like non-dismissable context text on twitter and under youtube videos that are often off topic and triggered by bad speech detection that simply take you to a link dump of regular news articles. I don&#x27;t like the idea that there&#x27;s an oligopoly on &quot;truth&quot; and &quot;credible sources.&quot; No amount of branding will convince me that &quot;fact checkers&quot; are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There&#x27;s no academic rigor to fact checking, and the reality that so much casual skepticism on a variety of topics was suppressed and equivocated with being a flat-earther is sickening.