I feel like this is the fate of a lot of large companies whose core business, at one point, revolved around innovation and engineering. Over time, good engineering and creative innovation take a back seat to the company being run more like a hedge fund or a bank than a technology company. This is when the fall from grace usually starts.

They're not equal but making bad decisions will cause them to lose market share. Making a disastrous decision like intentionally giving misinformation to people is enough to lose you your core customer base.

I believe the big difference between you and I is that I don't see misinformation filtering as a bad thing because the internet is not centrally controlled. The market for web apps on the internet is pure and unregulated capitalism which is how it should stay.

No one is forcing you to use Google or YouTube. People use them because they are good tools and they, more often than not, deliver accurate information. In the event that Google falls under the influence of a hypothetical deep state, it would become apparent very quickly by using another search engine. You would get completely different results. Over time, the inaccuracy of the information would cause a sizable amount of people to swap over to other tools. That's what's great about capitalism. It gives you options. The internet is democracy.

Another hard pill for free speech absolutists to swallow is that most people are just incapable of "doing their own research" at a level that is required to understand complex topics. I direct your attention to this site.

https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/08/whats-the-latest-u-s-literacy-rate/

About half of the US has a literacy rating that qualifies as below the reading capabilities of an eight grader. Only 12 percent of the country has a literacy rate that is proficient enough to identify sources as unreliable. The theory that people should be able to do their own research is great, but this actually just goes to prove my point. Doing your own research is impossible for the average person when there is so much misinformation out there.

The scariest thing for me is not information being centrally controlled. There's far too many tools that allow us to get the information we want. Information suppression would also have to come with large social changes that change the fabric of western society. The scariest thing for me is that foreign governments can use misinformation to control a population and cause chaos among its citizens. That's what's scariest to me.

So the lab leak theory is not confirmed as fact, there's just a bit more evidence for it that brings slightly more credibility to it as a hypothesis? That's a long way from being confirmed as fact.

Same thing with the Hunter laptop stuff. Random computer repair person gets dropped a laptop with an unknown chain of custody by someone claiming to be Hunter Biden at a time when it would have been the most damaging to Joe Biden's campaign for president. The laptop then falls under the custody of not the police but Rudy Giuliani of all people. Never mind that the forensic evidence for the laptop is muddled at best.

This is why information surrounding controversial subjects from the conservative side gets marked as misinformation. Just like your previous post, you take speculation and misconstrue it as fact. So yes, it is still misinformation to say that the lab leak theory is a proven fact and it is still misinformation to say that the Hunter Biden laptop proves wrongdoing by Biden.

I'm not saying that in then future, more information will not surface about these subjects that turn them into facts, but at present, it's all speculation and should be treated as such.

Can you give a source for the rumors about COVID being leaked from a lab? The last I had heard, the lab leak theory was still speculation.

I feel like the UK not having a huge military and the world's reserve currency as their own isn't as big of a deal in comparison to some of the other issues that the UK has. They tried to be, as you said, US-lite, but the UK doesn't have the massive domestic market, the abundant natural resources, and the population that the US has.

The US can constantly flirt with the idea of isolationism because its large domestic market and access to resources allows it to do so with potentially less harmful side effects than a small island nation like the UK that has always sustained itself off of international trade. This just plays into the idea that a lot of people from the UK view themselves as an island in the middle of the Atlantic rather than just off the coast of Europe.