Before the shooting, social media companies relaxed their protocols around misinformation.
In the weeks and months before the Aug. 8 shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, posts tying Covid vaccines to mental illness accrued millions of views online.
Previously more tightly moderated, some of the world’s largest social media platforms now operate with far fewer guardrails, allowing vaccine misinformation to flourish.
On X, for example, verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers openly claimed in recent weeks that Covid vaccines act like “chemical lobotomies,” which is false.
On Facebook, health influencers with broad reach alleged that Covid vaccines cause severe brain damage or other severe side effects such as cancer, despite no scientific basis for those claims.
And on TikTok, videos repeating the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism drew hundreds of thousands of views this year, spreading doubt to wide audiences.
The effects of misinformation getting people killed, but the idiots spreading it don’t care. Just the cost of doing business…
You can spout dangerous conspiracy theories but you can’t say the words “shit” or “fuck”
That is because we are in the Good Place.
Tap for spoiler
Stochastic terrorism
An NBC News Stay Tuned Poll from April found that nearly a third of U.S. adults under 30 are feeling lonelier and more anxious about the future than their elders.
This is interesting. Loneliness and anxiety are two different things, but I strongly suspect that anxiety can cause additional loneliness, due to how it discourages risk-taking behavior. Let’s make no mistake, going out and connecting with people can come across as a risky behavior.
Oh, and by “social media”, we are talking about platforms run by private tyrannies.
I don’t get how people are still pushing this nonsense. Over 200 million people have taken the Covid vaccine inside the US alone. If it was that dangerous we’d see SOME kind of evidence of it by now.
Or, if you are part of the “wellness” cult, you can just make up that “evidence”.
I mean, hell, they do it for things like MMR and have been lying about this shit quite extensively since at least the 90s (the anti-intellectualism of the anti-vaccine movement goes back to the very beginning I realize). How many Americans have had that shot? Throw in scary terms like “spike protein” and it being new(ish) tech, and the propensity for outrageous bullshit in the black helicopter scene takes on new heights.
