[BurningPenguin]

Not from the US, but i don't see how it was ever a "taboo". The general gist was "we don't know" or "unlikely". However, what i did see on Social Media, was a bunch of nutjobs pushing their nonsense about "deep state", "population control" and so on.

[sharperguy]

I believe that these 'nutjobs' were promoted to the forefront of popular discussion for purposes of sensationalism and to discredit more careful dissenting voices by association.

In many ways, it makes sense to try to get the entire population on board with a single narrative, in order to have a coherent response to an emerging situation. On the other hand, it opens the doors to corruption by leaving those in charge with no credible voices willing to criticize or draw attention to the holes in that narrative.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

>I believe that these 'nutjobs' were promoted to the forefront of popular discussion for purposes of sensationalism and to discredit more careful dissenting voices by association.

That just sounds like an unfounded conspiracy theory.

More likely is that extreme statements on social media generate more reactions, which is more engagement, so they get more traction in feeds because that is what social media is optimised to do, irrespective of what the content is.

And these nutjobs routinely invoked the term "lab leak", which organically led to an association in most people's minds between the term "lab leak" and crazy conspiracy theories.

[BurningPenguin]

These nutjobs were all over Twitter, Facebook & Co. Usually platforms that reward engagement with more visibility. The people who were pushing this narrative were relying heavily on a mix of gullible people, fake accounts and bots. Many accounts being merely a few weeks or up to a month old. This is essentially the reason i left Twitter in the first place. I'm observing the conspiracy milieu for over 10 years now. This tactic isn't new, they already used this in 2009 to push comments on certain websites to their side. Back then, it was mostly manual work. Also, thanks to social media, they don't need help from trashy news agencies to be seen.

[whimsicalism]

> I believe that these 'nutjobs' were promoted to the forefront of popular discussion for purposes of sensationalism and to discredit more careful dissenting voices by association.

It's interesting that this social media promoting action was so coordinated that it is happening on this very thread in Hacker News.