God, COVID broke so many people's brains in so many ways.

Let me say first that I at least partly agree with you. The government/media/social media response to COVID was, in many ways, catastrophic. I could write a book on all the ways that scientific communication was mishandled and became politicised. But COVID was a once in a generation event.

Everybody was panicking in one way or another. Nobody knew which way was up. Millions of people were dying. So scientists went WAAAY too far in trying to control a narrative. This was a huge mistake that trickled down to fact-checkers. But the failure to handle that globally seismic event perfectly does not equal a system that must be thrown away forever.

There are lots of lessons that we can and must learn from COVID. The need for greater accuracy and transparency and freedom to debate being just a few of them. But those lessons can only be learned if we try to improve the system, not if we abandon it. Because it's not just that community notes "isn't the best" system, it's that it's far worse than traditional fact-checking.

Do you think we'd have been better off during COVID, do you think less misinformation would have been flying around, if we were relying on random users with little-to-no insight into the once in a generation event to add community notes to posts?

Also, Big Tech is STILL subject to pressure from whatever administration is in power. Fact checking and government interference are two overlapping but different things. Elon "free speech is what I say it is" Musk's Twitter has complied with MORE government takedown requests than Dorsey's Twitter did.

Fact-checking and censorship are not synonyms. I'm absolutely stunned to see that they are in so many people's minds.