People who support these kinds of activities are youthful and arrogant enough to have any form of humility about things they once passionately believed to be true turning out to be incorrect.
In the 90's, eggs were thought to be as deadly as cigarettes. A bowl of cheerios was considered to be vastly superior nutrition wise to a plate of eggs. This is the opposite of what we know to be true today. If I had tried to argue against this with the current form of Facebook, I'd be censored. (They also thought avocados were bad for you in the 90s.)
The elevation of a collectively determined "objective" truth over the freedom of individuals to exchange ideas is the first step towards creating an environment for authoritarianism to flourish. Subjugation of the individual to the collective is the norm in most of history, and it's not an accident that our current prosperity emerged when in the times and places where it was lifted.
> People who support these kinds of activities are youthful and arrogant enough to have any form of humility about things they once passionately believed to be true turning out to be incorrect.
It's not just that. Usually the folks you'll see on forums like HN, or many other tech spaces, aren't the people who would have had trouble having their voice heard in a pre-internet age. They're usually the (generally not brown or black) children of wealthy families, many of them being 2nd generation scientists or engineers, and would have had privileged access to publishing houses, financial news, or high quality PSTN lines. This is why these spaces usually see so much more of the bad associated with these technologies than the good. The old status quo was very much a benefit to them, their families, and the milieu they grew up in.
Ask someone who grew up or had family in a country where PSTN over copper was a crapshoot and where sending exorbitantly expensive telegraphs and mail out of the country were really the only ways to get your voice heard, and you'll hear a very different story.
That's not to say Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies have society's best interest in mind (I doubt they do) nor that they are impartial operators (I really don't think they are), nor that they shouldn't be regulated as any other neutral communications carrier, but simply that this is one of the main reasons why tech forums tend to hate so much on social media.
If your basis for believing it's the result of a lab leak is it would make a really juicy story with no basis in reality then it's an obvious untruth at time of telling even if it later turns out to be true.
