There is no bottom
After reading a bunch of filthy transphobe garbage on twitter yesterday and already feeling queasy, I came across this. I need to take a shower and have a stiff drink. It is just so horrible:
My 6-year-old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition. Paramedics got his heart beating, but it was too late to save his brain. I could hold his hand, look at the small birthmark on it, comb his hair, and call out for him, but if he could hear me or feel me, he gave no sign. He had been a child in perpetual motion, but now we couldn’t get him to wiggle a finger.
My grief is profound, ragged, desperate. I cannot imagine how anything could feel worse.
But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son’s death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.”
I’m a North Carolina–based journalist who specializes in countering misinformation on social media. I know that Twitter, Facebook, and other networks amplify bad information; that their algorithms feed on anger and division; that anonymity and distance bring out the worst in some people online. And yet I had never anticipated that anyone would mock and terrorize a grieving parent. I’ve now received thousands of harassing posts. Some people emailed me at work.
For the record, my son saw some of the finest pediatric-ICU doctors in the world. He was in fact vaccinated against COVID-19. None of his doctors deemed that relevant to his medical condition. They likened his death to a lightning strike.
Strangers online saw in our story a conspiracy—a cover-up of childhood fatalities caused by COVID vaccines, a ploy to protect Big Pharma.
To them, what happened to my son was not a tragedy. It was karma for suckered parents like me.
Although some abusive posts showed up on my public Facebook page, the problem started on Twitter—whose new CEO, Elon Musk, gutted the platform’s content-moderation team after taking over.
I posted my son’s obituary there because we’d started a fundraiser in his name for the arts program at his neighborhood school. Books didn’t hold his interest, but he loved drawing big, blocky Where the Wild Things Are–style creatures. The fundraiser gave us something, anything, to do. Most people were kind. Many donated. But within days, anti-vaxxers hijacked the conversation, overwhelming my feed. “Billy you killed your kid man,” one person wrote.
Accompanying the obituary was a picture of him showing off his new University of North Carolina basketball jersey—No. 1, Leaky Black—before a game. He’s all arms and legs. He will only ever always be that. Cheeks like an apple. His bangs flopped over his almond-shaped eyes. “Freckles like constellations,” his obit read. He looks unpretentious, shy, and bored. Like most children his age, anything that takes more than an hour, such as a college basketball game, is too long.
Strangers swiped the photo from Twitter and wrote vile things on it. They’d mined my tweets, especially ones where I had written about the public-health benefits of vaccination. Someone needed to make me pay for vaccinating my child, one person insinuated. Another said my other children would be next if they were vaccinated too.
I tried to push back. Please take the conspiracy theories elsewhere, I pleaded on Twitter. That made things worse, so I stopped engaging. A blogger mocked me for fleeing social media. Commenters joined in. My grief, their content. “Your one job as a parent was to protect your children,” wrote one person. “You failed miserably.”
Apparently, these people troll anyone who reports a death on social media with a stupid hashtag #DiedSuddenly, as if all death is now caused by vaccines. I’ve seen it over and over again and it doesn’t get any more cruel. Some are bots, to be sure, although it would be interesting to know who’s running them. But mostly they are just dumbasses who have made it their life’s work to be the biggest asshole on the internet.
If you were cynical about human nature before, the advent of social media has confirmed all of your worst fears.