Yesterday, the Biden administration promised to redouble its efforts to investigate the origin of COVID-19, which many leading scientists believe may

How Twitter Cultivated the Media’s Lab-Leak Fiasco

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2021-05-27 22:30:10

Yesterday, the Biden administration promised to redouble its efforts to investigate the origin of COVID-19, which many leading scientists believe may well have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Democrats in Congress are also proposing an investigation.

I don’t know if this hypothesis will ever be proven. I don’t care, and I’ve never cared. There’s no important policy question riding on the answer, nor would confirming the thesis in any way vindicate former president Trump’s horrific mismanagement of the pandemic.

What the episode does reveal is the vulnerabilities in the mainstream- and liberal-media ecosystem. Media coverage of the lab-leak hypothesis was a debacle, and a major source of that failure was groupthink cultivated on Twitter.

The basic factual contours of this episode are pretty simple. There has never been a clear expert consensus on the virus’s origins. There were a handful of scientists with unusually robust social-media profiles expressing strong views:

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