For a few days on Facebook we can again write that the covid-19 virus has leaked from a Wuhan laboratory. Not that it is true, but we can no longer say that it is definitely false. Until last Thursday if you wrote it you were a dangerous fake news dealer, you just wanted to feed disinformation and put China in a bad light. Who remembers Donald Trump? Here, when he was president of the United States and said that according to him that virus had not come by chance from a bat or a pangolin, but was the result of the experiments of Chinese researchers, when he said it they gave him a mystifier and above all he could not write it on Facebook. In fact, at the time the social network, in agreement with the World Health Organization, had decided to label as disinformation any hypothesis of linking the pandemic to an error in the security systems of the Wuhan laboratory (or worse, to an intentional spread of the virus).
What has changed? An investigation of the The Wall Street Journal added some elements, such as the fact that several researchers from the laboratory in question had mysteriously fallen ill as early as November 2019, and therefore a few weeks before the official start of the pandemic. Does this prove anything? No, for now it does not rule it out. American intelligence claims that there are several clues and the president Joe Biden he asked China for clarity by giving 90 days to cooperate.
But many remember well the pantomime of phony evidence of weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein by the US intelligence and government in 2003, to take any such claims with caution. What we certainly know about the birth and spread of the covid 19 virus is that we still don’t know enough, and who knows if we will ever know. This relativism does not mean being at the mercy of fake news. It means that in the meantime we should act with prudence and judgment before banning any claims that diverge from the official truth. One thing is full-blown disinformation, another is propaganda, another is the unproven hypothesis: putting everything in the comfortable bundle of fake news does not help the search for truth and weakens our freedom of expression and our critical sense.
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