[aftbit]

Certainly at the beginning, the tools weren't 100% in place, at least in the west. Famously, China silenced one of the very first COVID reporters and forced him to recant, before he himself died from the virus.[1]

As the pandemic wore on, we began to see a fight over "fact-checking". Mostly, it played out on Facebook and YouTube, not in traditional media. At the height, I saw a lot of channels self-censoring by avoiding any mention of the words "COVID", "virus", "coronavirus" etc to avoid the AI bot that would capriciously ban or demonetize their videos because it clocked them as COVID misinformation, even when they weren't primarily talking about the virus or proposing any sort of false, harmful, or misleading takes. Many channels do similar today, saying "PDF files" instead of pedophiles or "SA" / "Sea Ess Eh Em" instead of "sexual assault" or "kiddy porn" while talking about the Epstein files. Or everyone's favorite, "unalive" or "self-delete" instead of "dead"/"kill" or "suicide".

I don't have a good source for most of that handy - I just remember living through it. I'm sorry, I know anecdotes aren't data!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

[xracy]

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I also lived through it, and you and I remember it differently. Which is why I asked for clear examples, because it's easy to go back and forth about anecdotes.