Non-BSL4 labs shouldn't be ignored, though. Back in Feb 2020, a rumor circulating on Chinese social media said that there was a Non-BSL4 lab involved in researching bat viruses in the city. See my other comment as well.
Yet another hypothesis being pushed by the CCP party-state is the seafood imports hypothesis. Although the motivation behind CCP's push is questionable, this hypothesis shall be treated seriously, given that in the early investigation before the ban, signs of the virus were detected at stores selling seafood instead of stores selling illegal games.
Back in Feb 2020, a rumor circulating on Chinese social media said that there was another lab in the city near the market, which was a competitor to the lab of Wuhan Institute of Virology that is most widely mentioned, under the umbrella of a university of agriculture/forestry/geology (I don't remember the exact details).
I am not sure about the validity of the rumor, though.
Here is my heavily biased take. People need to teach analytic philosophy, scientific methodology, logical empiricism, social-psychological dynamics, journalism, jurisprudence, and perhaps a version of initiative (e.g. initiative to try doing journalistic investigation or playing an impartial judge) in middle schools for every student.
I'm not sure if it is too much to ask from folks, but progress doesn't come easy anyway.
I have an amusing idea: an independent amateur journalist network, composed of people doing the field work, in their free time. I'm not confident it will ever come true, but it's good to fantasize, at the minimum.
All effects aren't caused by a single factor. Free speech as a causal factor may enable an unfortunate causal path, but we can weaken this path by attenuating or removing its enabling antecedents, or by adding or amplifying its mitigating decedents. As such, multiple solutions to a problem that corresponds to a causal path exist.
Our values and understanding decide what solutions we seek. If a person doesn't recognize or underestimate the benefits of free speech, this person may accept or prefer a large degree of censorship as the straightforward solution.
Of course, finding an alternative solution needs insight and broad knowledge, which perhaps isn't that commonplace, even in academia.
Slightly off-topic. I was thinking if people can enforce a model where users can choose to delegate encryption work to OS or some kind of network gateway, and inspection is allowed before encryption happens, this would be a clean and built-in solution for the inspection issue.
This reasoning is valid when randomization is not pre-configured and is done at the individual level. It doesn't hold when talking about changes that come with browsers etc and deployed at scale.
I read a bit about that. The claim that Google was blocked due to unwillingness to follow Chinese laws isn't true.
Be noted that China is not a country under rule of law.
When Google was blocked, there was no primary legislation stipulating that online content shall be censored in whatsoever way. There were vague administrative rules (secondary legislation) with questionable applicability. Today, there is only one piece of primary legislation with a section on online censorship in China, but this section targets ISPs only, not content providers.
Thank you. That's much more informative than the Wikimedia Foundation's own version of events. The textual account is incomplete, as there were statements by Iran, Russia, Canada, and Pakistan, and it was China that had the closing remarks, not the United States. It's also not quite an accurate transcript.
So:
It turns out that China looked up the Wikimedia Foundation on Wikipedia.
It compared what Wikipedia said with what was in the Wikimedia Foundation's application documents.
The Wikimedia Foundation put 124 user groups, 39 geographic chapters and 2 thematic organizations on its application form.
The Chinese delegation to WIPO, deciding to trust Wikipedia in this instance, found that Wikipedia stated that the Wikimedia Foundation had 47 user groups, 41 chapters, and 1 thematic organization.
So the first prong of the objection was a formal way of saying "Did this organization lie on its application form?".
The second prong was a vague complaint against unspecified content violating the One China Policy on "the affiliated Web site of the Foundation". This could be the Foundation wiki; Wikimedia Taiwan's own WWW site (http://wikimedia.tw/); the Chinese-language Wikipedia; the English-language Wikipedia; Meta; or even something else entirely. China didn't actually say.
There's some clever chess here. For starters, the Wikimedia Foundation now has to officially state for the record that the Chinese Wikipedia does not provide up-to-date accurate information.
