This piece about the effects of misinformation on the pandemic is scary. It’s long and highly detailed and I recommend that you read the whole thing. But I’m posting an excerpt with what I think is the most disconcerting finding:
A small handful of activists have used the Internet to persuade a very significant proportion of the public the world around—roughly one in every five people2—that contrary to overwhelming evidence, vaccines are not the safest, most effective and most consequential invention in medical history, but rather a sinister and dangerous menace that should be eschewed. It is an achievement on a par with persuading people to mix their drinking water with their sewage.
It should not be possible to convince so many people to believe something that is at once so unfounded in any evidence and so contrary to the most fundamental of human drives: staying alive. What does it mean that it’s possible? It strongly suggests that so long as social media is configured the way it is, anything is possible. The Internet, as it’s now structured, may be used to persuade at least one in five people that up is down, black is white, and if you leap off the top of a skyscraper, you’ll fly.
For open societies in particular, this is a massive vulnerability. It is trivially easy for hostile states and sociopaths to exploit this, and they do exploit it. They’ll continue to exploit it this way until one of two things happens: We find a more rational way to organize the Internet, or we’re destroyed by it.
If you think this an exaggeration, turn it over again in your mind. A recent study of the anti-vaccination movement found that 73 percent of the anti-vax propaganda on Facebook originates among the same twelve people.3 They are superspreaders. Other studies have come to similar conclusions. Here, for example, is Newsguard’s data sheet. Russia boosts these accounts—heavily—but the phenomenon is not of Russian origin.
What this suggests is that it’s not only theoretically possible for a dozen-odd people, mostly Americans and Europeans, to persuade a fifth of the world to join a death cult, it has happened already. So this is unlikely to be a rare event. These figures are well-known to researchers. The superspreaders include both physicians and alternative health entrepreneurs. They tend to be in it for the money. They promote “natural health” cures. They sell books and supplements. They run multiple accounts across different platforms. When taken off a social media platform, they pop up under other names and guises, but they’re the same people.
The impact of their activity isn’t a massive imponderable. It can be quantified and measured. Last February, Sahil Loomba et al. published the results of research on vaccine misinformation in an article in Nature titled, Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA. The experiment was randomized; the sample large; the results significant. In both the US and the UK, exposure to anti-vaccination propaganda induced an immediate 6.2-6.4 percent decline in willingness to be vaccinated.
“Scientific-sounding” misinformation, they found, was more strongly associated with a decline in intent to be vaccinated. And once people have been exposed to this garbage, it’s damned near impossible to reverse the effects. Telling people they should not take seriously reports that “an eight-year-old who got the vaccine was found dead in his bed ten hours later” has exactly the effect it will now have on you when I tell you not to think about yellow elephants.
It requires years of study to master complex and difficult questions in medicine. Bad ideas and superstition, however, are accessible to all. Pastor Chris Oyakhilome lives in Lagos. It is immensely unlikely that he independently arrived upon the thesis that 5G technology causes Covid19. He believes this because a handful of lunatics in the West have been spreading this idea—all the way to Nigeria. They’ve done so much faster than anyone could spread useful medical knowledge, because acquiring a body of useful medical knowledge takes years of study, much of it hands-on.
There’s much more and it’s fascinating. It’s also depressing as hell. This is the last thing we need…
By the way, Former FBI agent Clinton Watts said today on MSNBC that the Surgeon General’s report on misinformation is the best report on the subject he’s ever seen the US Government produce.