The government has no authority to decide for me whether something is misinformation. They can share their opinions and I'll be the judge of what I trust. If Facebook reaches the same conclusion independently, without being coerced by the government, I'd react according to how I feel about the specific issue. Maybe I'd stop using the platform. I'm not claiming NYT or FB needs to publish my views, I don't expect that at all. What I don't want is the government telling them what they can and can't publish.

Yeah that works great up until the people who distribute memos act like Facebook, and then the people who sell you ink, and then the phone companies, and then ....

Really why is this so hard to understand. There's nothing special about tech firms in this story except the naivety of their executives, who have ended up looking like utter tools in this whole sorry charade. These idiots systematically suppressed discussion of the lab leak hypothesis for over a year and then once the Biden admin started taking it seriously decided, whoops, maybe it wasn't misinformation after all and stopped banning it. Twitter was systematically banning stuff even whilst expressing serious reservations internally because they knew the claims were true. Yet these firms are nonetheless still doing better than Google, at least Facebook and Twitter realized they were wrong in the end.

This thread seems to be full of FAANG employees desperately trying to come up with some reason why their employers are not in fact easily duped rubes who would sew the mouths of their own mothers shut if a 100% conflicted mid-level nobody at the CDC suggested it.