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YouTube Breeding Harmful Scientific Misinformation
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "University of Toronto researchers have uncovered widespread misinformation in videos on YouTube related to vaccination and immunization. In the first-ever study of its kind, they found that over half of the 153 videos analyzed portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or ambiguously. They also found that videos highly skeptical of vaccinations received more views and better ratings by users than those videos that portray immunizations in a positive light. According to the lead researcher, 'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination. Our study shows that a significant amount of immunization content on YouTube contradicts the best scientific evidence at large. From a public health perspective, this is very concerning.' An extract from the Journal of the American Medical Association is available online."
I don't see why the fact that this misinformation is on youtube is a big deal. It probably just reflects actual public perceptions of science. Educate people, don't act shocked when uneducated people say stupid things.
Currently hooked on AMP
I'm not one to support eugenics, but... this might be nature's way of working out its own kinks.
We have to remember there is a large sub-culture in the US/Canada and Europe who still think that evolution is a myth, and the world was created 6,000 years ago.
They make YouTube videos as well.
Just because they can use tech doesn't mean they grok tech.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You honestly have to wonder how people can make super-important decisions for their children and themselves using _YouTube_ as their main provider of information. It's sad, but it's just like all those folks getting burned on their million dollar homes with sub-primes - you made a bad decision because you didn't do enough research, and you should be the one paying the price.
You are simply never going to protect all the stupid people from themselves, and making the effort often only punishes the smart people who didn't make those mistakes. That's the unfortunate realization I've come to in my adulthood.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I can't help but think that it could only help the gene pool if the type of people who would think "hey, let's go look up important medical information on YouTube!" were given bad medical advice. Darwinism and all that.
(Except, of course, that this is more about misinformed parents harming their children. But still - I can't imagine why anyone would think "hey, I wanna find out more about immunization on YouTube!" I suppose they could be starting on a search engine and winding up at YouTube. But that ruins the joke.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I have a simple question .....
Do you trust Pharmaceutical Companies to give you all the information you need to make an intelligent decision?
Personally, I don't trust any of them.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Of course, as we all know the medical/pharmaceutical industries will always play down risks associated with vaccines (which there are many, as is well documented).
I think this isn't so much proof of ignorance, but rather evidence that the "average" American actually has doubts about what we're being told and injected with.
And I can't blame anyone one bit for feeling that way.
If mainstream MDs and researchers care about getting their point of view out to patients, so that people who find out they have a disease don't have to learn about it from YouTube, spam, and pharmaceutical company sites, they're going to have to start using more Open Access journals or get their existing journals to go Open Access.
Someone has the nerve to complain about the scientific quality of information found on YouTube??? WTF All I can say is these people haven't been watching much of anything from Hollywood or from mainstream news media. Here, again, we have the opportunity to show that teaching and guidance are required for just about EVERYTHING in life, and that includes what to believe of what you hear/read/and see. Check your source, get a second opinion, buyer beware, you get what you pay for. Seems like all that crazy old s**T that grandpa used to say might have some truth to it? hmmm
I'm willing to bet that at least one of these concerned researchers went to a school where he was told that masturbation will make him crosseyed or make him go blind. Misinformation has been around since the advent of spoken language, and possibly before. It was only relatively recently that we all agreed (well most of us) that the earth is round.
It is not medical information that needs to be filterd, or the fscking Internet... we need to teach people how to get through life without falling prey to every scam and rumor that falls into their world. I remember recently the many people who recommended Chantix to me to help me stop smoking... Guess what Mr smart research scientists.. they were doctors and experts, and I had no reason to not believe them till people started having psychotic episodes and killing themselves.
Lets all just sing in 3 part harmony about the evils of not educating your kids, the public, your friends, and the world in general. The problem is not that there is misleading information out there, the problem is that people are so willing to be mislead.
While we are on subject... ehh, people who are willing to be mislead are also willing to believe that the government's "need" to encroach on their rights is necessary. An EDUCATED public is a strong one, but that is hardly what big business and big government want.
Educate people in general, not on just one little danger. Teach a man to fish..... nuff said
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What makes these "researchers" think that people are coming to YouTube for medical advice? I'd bet that a lot (if not most) people are watching these videos for the absurd entertainment value they provide.
It's one thing to simply count hits. It's quite another to infer the reason(s) behind them.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Sadly, this will continue to happen for a lot of reasons, but mostly, like all conspiracy theories, it actually is comforting to believe that a shadowy world government is in charge. Or to think that the reason people are autistic, or get cancer, is because of vaccines. It lets people know that there are reasons for otherwise random events, events that could happen to them any day now, or to those they love. But if you can have something concrete to blame it on, instead of just the randomness and uncertainty of life, well, then you can get angry at whatever tangible entity you want.
And things like youtube are perfect for the type of disinfo that these theories represent. The question now is how do we counter these claims? I would highly suggest listening to the Skepticality podcast ( http://www.skepticality.com/p_listentopast.php )ablout the documentary Flock of Dodos. The main theme is a discussion about how real science needs to learn to present its information and findings in a far more entertaining and easily digestible format. Just throwing facts and numbers at people, while it makes me happy, turns off the majority.
This is kind of like the whole 9/11 truth issue. People who have seen the conspiracy videos on youtube can be almost immune to evidence about physics, metallurgy, demolitions, and such. Their eyes just glaze over when you try to use facts and numbers and evidence. But if you point them towards a source like http://www.youtube.com/user/RKOwens4 which is comprised of simple arguments against the 9/11 truth theories, in easy to understand 3 minute chapters, then you start to make headway.
This is the course science must take with the public. Like it or not. The alternative is far to dangerous.
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There are a lot of people (see above) that are just saying "Whoda thunk there's misinformation on the internet," but this is not the point of the article. The point is that misinformation is being ranked higher than videos showing the scientific truth. Now for entertainment sake, that's fine. In this case however, many of the videos were meant to be informative or persuasive instead of strictly entertainment.
We'll take a parallel into Hollywood. The fact that there's entertainment based off of lies or misinformation is no big deal. I don't know of too many people who think their car will randomly transform into a robot or their body is being used as a battery to power a giant ai network. The problem the article is hinting at is many of these videos are supposed to be informative and we break into the realm of documentaries or informational movies (i.e. Fahrenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth, etc.) Now I don't want this debate to get political (although I think it may) but we'll further examine Fahrenheit 9/11. I personally am a democrat and when I saw this movie, I believed much more than I should of to be the absolute truth. Later on a fair portion of the movie was debunked, but because it was a compelling story in line with my own viewpoint, it was easy to believe.
To add to this, I have heard many people tell urban legends to me (which I knew to be untrue) as the absolute truth. The point is that humans tend to believe what makes a good story and not necessarily the truth, which in many cases is too bad.
I don't think it's unlikely or unheard of that there's misinformation on the net and I really don't feel that's what this article is getting at. Instead the article is pointing a blame-ful finger at the gullibility of human kind.
Sometimes lies may be fun, but take them only at face value.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
One of the real dangers about people not getting their children immunized is that it allows the virus to remain in the population and repeatedly exposes immunized individuals to live virus which increases the likelihood of a resistant strain developing. So not only are they endangering their own children, but everyone else as well.
Unfortunately in this case (vaccines), depending of course on the disease, you'll wander around for a while as a carrier infecting others, some of whom a vaccine may not be sufficient protection for (in the case of for example Influenza, elderly or otherwise immunocompromised individuals). Such people may be able to tolerate one or two infections, but have their immune system exhausted and not be able to survive additional assaults. If the carrier had been immunized instead, their immune system might have been strong enough to keep them from ever being a carrier at all, saving the immunocompromised individual one of their "get out of death free" cards. Meanwhile the carrier feels sick for a few days, infects a few dozen people, recovers, and goes on to live their life like normal.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Going back to the first quote, let's just say for sake of argument you're right, about being a single person in the population who does not get immunized. Let's just say at that point you run a higher risk of getting the disease from the vaccine than from another source.
How do you know when you're in that situation? How do you know, you're the ONE person, of all the people you may come in contact with, the one lone person who has system beat? (And of course that the only vector by which the disease will spread to you is through another unimmunized person.)
Oh, that's right, you don't. So you've set up some fantastical situation that will never occur, even if your conclusion is correct.
Thanks for the comparison... I think we're all flattered to be considered livestock.
And no, I don't think governments in general always are interested in the health of their citizens. I believe the GGPP was talking about the Canadian government specifically, and I don't know much about that government. I do know that ours in the US seems all too eager to sell us all down the river for short-term commercial interests. I don't trust pharmaceutical companies developing immunizations more than I have to. I still believe in immunizing my kids, but I don't believe we should be doing it at the rate they're telling us to. And I don't believe that combining 3 or more immunizations into a single shot is always such a great idea.
I do think that immunizations are important, though.
And considering that most medical research is funded by grants issued by government agencies, yeah I think they're pretty well qualified to provide such advice.
Or maybe it was nuclear power. Or computers. Or the proliferation of color T.V. Or NASA bringing back moon-rocks. While my theories are sillier than yours, they do have something in common with it.....they're all unsupported by current available evidence.
Nope, it's not glaring too hard, but still......Sure, you should be cautious about anything that someone wants to inject into your (or your child's) body. But the fact is, the vaccines we have today make you *less* likely to become ill, not more. The reason for compulsive vaccines isn't to further some dark plot, but to make sure you aren't a vector for disease that could affect the rest of us.
I don't get a flu shot since I'm not in a particularly high-risk group for a bad bout with it, but I know, and so does everyone else who pays attention to their doctor, the nightly news, or any of a thousand other sources that the projected strain may not be the one that actually hits. That's why it's a projected strain, and not a guaranteed strain.
They distrust them because they don't understand them very well. This is a combination of the medical field not explaining it well enough to them, and their own lack of motivation to learn about them.
Get of your lawn? I'm not coming within a thousand yards of your house! The only things I'm relatively sure I'm not going to catch from you are Polio and Tetanus!
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
I do. I guess that's because I'm smart enough to realize, as would be the "politicians", that we're not talking about your health, or my health, we're talking about PREVENTING A FUCKING PANDEMIC.
Not individual infections. Not a small outbreak. A worldwide, humanity crushing pandemic.
Let that sink into your tiny little brain for a second. Hopefully, you'll realize why your post is so ridiculous.
Forgive me for being so confrontational, but when your idiot ass decides to put me at risk because you're afraid of vaccines, you deserve to be called to task on it.
I can see using YouTube for finding "don't taze me bro" or "Star Wars Kid" or any number of other entertaining or interesting bits of ephemera, but seriously, if you're getting your health information from YouTube, you need to be seeing a MENTAL HEALTH expert.
The Digital Sorceress
The difference between public health statistics and personal health statistics is also enormous, and missed by people like you.
It's called the law of large numbers. In any large population, extremely suspicious coincidences will occur with startling regularity. You will have entire families who fall victim to weird, debilitating illnesses shortly after each one receives a vaccine, simply by coincidence. Because the general population doesn't understand probability or statistics, these people then become "proof" that there is more going on than what the official line claims.
And then people like you come along and make vague references to these cases, and infer without providing any references or data that there is no scientific proof of vaccine effectiveness, and make scary references to mercury while ignoring the well known effects and symptoms of heavy-metal poisoning.
I know I probably won't convince you because you conspiracy-theory types generally can't be convinced, but maybe I'll convince some people reading your story. You tell a good tale but you're unable to back it up with facts. Get a clue.
Most things humans do effect the entire society. By that rationalization, you could justify pretty much any government control over our lives.
People getting fat? Health care costs go up. Ban pizza. Mandate vegetable consumption.
Auto accidents? Ban private cars. Mandate public transportation use.
I've got two children, and I've had them both vaccinated. But lets not pretend that there are no dangers with vaccines. Our doctors were, to their credit, very upfront with us about that. You're essentially taking a chance, playing the numbers when you take a vaccine, as a percentage of people will always have adverse reactions. Those numbers of adverse reactions are statistically low, and your chances are pretty good, but I do have a friend whose daughter lost the use of her legs from a vaccination. It does happen. And as for the HPV vaccine, you can't call all those parents nutjobs when Gardisil has had some unexpected side-effects. And should a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease be mandatory anyway?
Non-vaccinated people are a danger to no one but themselves. If everyone else is vaccinated, they're safe. And far from under-vaccinating, the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that we may be over-vaccinating . Increasing disease resistance to drugs and immunizations is a far greater threat to the populace than any parent withholding a vaccine.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I think a lot of it is the drug lobby. When I was a kid, you didn't get the hepatitis vaccine. I got mine on the way to college. Why? Because there was no need to get it. What are the odds of you getting hepatitis in this country? 1.5 per 100,000 and most of those are "high risk" people, because it's hard to catch without having sex with someone who has it, or using a dirty needle.
But now I've got my doctor telling me I have to get my infant kid vaccinated quick quick right now! He could get hep at any second!!! What a crock of crap. It's even less likely now than it was when I was a kid, because the infection rates are still dropping.
Likewise the chicken pox vaccine. The mortality from chicken pox is off the bottom of the chart, but none the less, unless I wanna home school my kid, I have to get them the shot.
I'm sure by next year, they're going to be calling for all infant girls to go ahead and get the hpv shot, because you can never be too careful about protecting your infant from STDs.
I think a lot of people are getting leery of having their kids turned into pincushions to meet an arbitrary timetable attached to low risk infections. I think it's 15 vaccinations before 1 year? Out of those, easily half could be pushed back a year or two or three (or 18 in the case or the 3 course goddamn hep vaccination), so why subject your kid to that kinda crap?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I don't believe for a second that in any serious way "YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information". People simply don't go to YouTube looking for medical information... that's stupid.
A stupid premise is no less stupid simply because a researcher from the the University of Toronto says it.
So there is bad information on YouTube. So what? Only a fool depends on random heresy for important factual information. Are we to censor all information sources to protect fools? Are we to censor information sources to only those officially licensed to present the "proper" information? Tell the would be censors and busybody nannies exactly where to stuff it.
I get your point, which is that it is up to scientists to prove that the things we inject into our bodies are as safe as possible. And scientists and doctors take that responsibility very very seriously. There may indeed be as-yet-unknown negative side effects to vaccination, and scientists acknowledge that possibility and try their best to study and look for it. But so far, they have not found a connection to things like autism or asthma.
Maybe they will find problems in the future. But at worst that will create a tough question of trade off, because there is simply no question that the vaccines are very effective at fighting their respective diseases. If your child has a 0.0001% chance of developing a debilitating disease FROM a vaccine, or a 1% chance of dying from a different disease WITHOUT the vaccine, that is not such a clear-cut decision.
Consider this tradeoff:
a) We know for a fact that vaccines are extremely effective at preventing many nasty, often deadly diseases in children. Numerous studies have demonstrated clear evidence, as has our common experience with the dramatic decline of deaths due to diseases like polio, smallpox, measles, hepatitis, tetanus, etc.
vs.
b) Some people think some vaccines might be factors in the development of certain diseases, but numerous studies have failed to find a linkage--either it does not exist, or is such a weak connection that it is easily missed in the data.
Please vaccinate your children.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Who is stupid enough to go to Youtube for authoritative information about anything? I mean, I get why people might use something like Wikipedia for this (with all the pitfalls that can bring), but this just plain does not make sense to me.
Who the hell goes to any single source for information when their health is what's at risk? I look for lots of authoritative sources. I've learnt from bitter experience to even check multiple drug safety sites before taking any prescription meds. You may think that's paranoid but I've personally seen well respected doctors prescribe meds that caused new problems or exacerbated existing ones. (I firmly believe my wife would be dead today if I hadn't stepped in and brought some information to a specialist's attention). When you have the best facts available, only then do you choose what to do with your health. Health can't be replaced, so it isn't something you risk.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'm amazed at the stupidity of the responses, and the moderators moderating it down to -1. How could you not see that I was explaining WHY people don't want to get immunized? The selfish response is to not get immunized. YES, IT IS THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS, YOU DOPE.
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