Originally published at: COVID-19 misinformation led to a bride missing her wedding and dying | Boing Boing
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Incredibly sad news indeed.
I have a real question here: What is the exact reason people create disinformation about vaccines? What’s in for them?
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I’d guess that some people do believe them (misinformation they read) to be true. Others are angling for a political advantage by playing the whole “those people are out to get you and hide the truth from you” card. Others are driving people to various “alternatives” that they have investments in.
I would argue that is matters little which is the actual motivation, as the outcome is the same - lots of people dying for no reason.
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Nobody believes that they will die until it happens. And that is why some vague risk of infertility seems more real than the very real risk of serious illness and death. The people spreading this misinformation are committing a horrible crime against humanity all around us and all the time.
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More blood on the hands of the death cultists. They must be thrilled.
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They live to kill.
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Editorial aside: can we please stop referring to “the COVID [shot]” as though there were only one? The totally nonsensical disinformation is bad enough, but people with legitimate (if exaggerated) concerns such as chemical sensitivities or menstrual perturbation shouldn’t be discouraged from finding a vaccine that works safely for them.
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Ultimately? Money. Money and power. I don’t know what information facebook gives back to advertisers , but essentially all these shared posts and ads lead to a ton of data. This data can then be sold. Also, these people can be marketed to using completely different looking / acting accounts through a wide variety of means.
When I mentioned my mother had cancer on facebook and it was bad, I got flooded with all kinds of “cancer cure” ads and emails. And a few messages, even. All of them wanted money.
In short, it’s likely a grift.
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5 posts were split to a new topic: The importance of education
It’s simply playing telephone. People hear something, then amplify it, modify it, until suddenly it’s a fact. I would bet most people (except the hardcore 4chan/8kun tr-lls) arent telling things they know to be false.
This fertility thing was a new one to me, though. Obviously, you’d be concerned if you were (or were very soon to be) pregnant. But I never heard the lie/rumor that the vaccine would affect fertility.
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To my surprise, talking is often more important than exact content.
Some people exist because they have an audience.
Or let’s say the need an audience to exist.
If I consider myself smart, my audience with follow me for what I have to say.
I don’t have to make an effort because it’s interesting by nature from smart people.
As I’m smart enought to talk only about what I know.
Now, some people want to exist without the necessary knowledge.
They can’t speak smart because they will be immediately stop by themselves. Everyone will be agree with them and they don’t have audience by saying the same thing than the obvious.
They can only try to make as much noise as possible with claim as stupid as possible to get their own audience.
Before you can only listen to them going to cheap bar at 5 p.m.
But with the social media, that gave them even larger audience. I’m completely agree with another answer that these social media value quantity and not quality. Quantity equal customers equal money.
So whatever you’re saying if it’s shared; it is great.
They usually don’t create contents but only share previous content.
If you want to fight fake news you should delete the “share” option.
That will force them to actually create something based on research and not just a repost.
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I can tell you right now there is a whole culture of grift, gaslighting, and manipulation around pregnancy like no other in the world.
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The specificity and “stickiness” of the lies and panic about fertility and vaccines is chilling. I know it’s been a bit overplayed to compare our current world to Handmaid’s Tale (Children of Men also?), but when the obsession with fertility arises, it really does make it seem like population collapse and infertility could usher in religious fascism more quickly than even economic collapse. It’s wild to me how baked in the connection still is between procreation and the “purpose” of human beings, as opposed to being a personal decision or lifestyle.
That’s not to say that this individual woman was somehow a silly sheeperson for being afraid of becoming infertile, that would be brutal if she is personally invested in having children. But rather how much strength in general those particular conspiracies have, and how many conspiracy mongers have latched onto that as the “theme” of their panic.
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Um, I guess. But as the drug makers on TV always say, talk to your doctor.
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Just watched this documentary on the Flat Earth evangelists.
It is truly fascinating seeing these people’s lives. The main takeaway is that it is about striving to connect with others in their cuddly long tail echo box.
The more mainstream society succeeds at isolating and shaming them the more it reinforces their position that the only ones who will be their friend are fellow “open minded truth seekers”.
This is their way of expressing skepticism.
And they are not all idiots. Plenty seem to have above average intelligence and more conventional education than average.
Some even do the sorts of experiments that would be called scientific if they were pursuing falsifiability. But when the experiment fails, it is just an irrelevant red herring and they start looking for other experiments to prove their theory.
For such dogmatic people, they are surprisingly flexible about what they believe. All flat earth theories are internally inconsistent. So when they get discouraged by their inconsistencies they just switch to another theory whose inconsistencies are less familiar.
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You had two too many consonants at the beginning of that word, and none of the three you did have were the correct one.
[Whistles nonchalantly in the face of BBS rules] Billed?
Thanks @Scientist for pointing out my brain fart. I meant consonants but typed syllables originally. D’oh!
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OK, so a women died of health misinformation. What are we to make of the Revcontent clickbait spam marketing at the bottom of this article’s page, promoting health misinformation?
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didn’t you mean “letters” instead of “syllables”?
I mean ‘k’ is a letter
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That it was served up without BB’s knowledge by a typically shady ad broker of the sort that most content providers are sadly reliant on to pay the bills? That you can report it and others like it by e-mailing badad@boingboing.net?
See this topic for more:
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We are in a global emergency.
Any COVID vaccine is both generally safe and effective.
None of them appear to impact fertility.
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