To the people we're debating with, yes! That doesn't mean everyone needs to have wide-eyed naivety about every possible person, institution or event that could be discussed.
> the lab-leak theory has a dark undercurrent: "China is bad".
> So flagging the lab-leak postings was in line with the HN's tendency to go for the charitable interpretation.
This is a useful case study of why so many people have a problem with wokeness: "we can't allow any criticism of the Chinese government because someone, somewhere, might do generalize to all Chinese and do something bad". That's destructive to intellectual curiousity and honesty of all kinds.
Anyway it doesn't seem like the best possible explanation. It wasn't just China-related stuff like that which got reliably flagged and downvoted. It's anything that criticized any aspect of the response, unless the criticism was insufficiently aggressive response.
A different attempt: HN has many people who owe their status in society to confidence in the academic/scientific system. Anything that brings that system into disrepute gets attacked. Same pattern is seen on discussions of vaccines, climate change, anything where there is allegation of bad behaviors by public sector researchers or people who justify their stance through caring about the collective future. Ideology is also corrupting. A very common response to people posting evidence of problems with the natural origin theory or other non-COVID scientific dogmas is "that link is to a right wing site so I won't look at it at all". The justification for it being a right wing site? That it contains criticism of government science, a perfect ideological catch 22.
A simple alternative is to make people select one of a handful of reasons for flagging, and if the selected reason doesn't seem justifiable, those people lose flagging privs.
