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Teen Who Defied Anti-Vax Mom Says She Got False Information From One Source: Facebook (washingtonpost.com)
An 18-year-old from Ohio who famously inoculated himself against his mother's wishes in December says he
attributes his mother's anti-vaccine ideology to a single source: Facebook [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Ethan Lindenberger, a high school senior, testified Tuesday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and underscored the importance of "credible" information. In contrast, he said, the false and deep-rooted beliefs his mother held -- that vaccines were dangerous -- were perpetuated by social media. Specifically, he said, she turned to anti-vaccine groups on social media for evidence that supported her point of view. In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Lindenberger said Facebook, or websites that were linked on Facebook, is really the only source his mother ever relied on for her anti-vaccine information.
...because the people who are stupid enough to easily believe all the crap they read on social media are usually the ones who are on social media the most. Oh, and those are the people having the most kids. The world is rapidly becoming the Idiocracy movie.
Seriously, who cares? People are going to pick and choose their sources to support their views. The implication of this "story" is more "wrong think" suppression, and that is far more dangerous than a few idiots not vaccinating.
It is interesting. If this is a common pattern (and I think it is), that means Facebook is the best place for an education campaign. This is a democracy with free speech (more or less) and we're not meant to solve problems of ignorance through government force or corporate censorship, but by winning in the marketplace of ideas.
Actually being right is a huge advantage in convincing people that you're right. The budget needed to drown Facebook in pro-Vax truth is tiny by government standards, especially if Facebook decides to give some free "air time" to the cause.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So why the moral panic?
Because people who don't get vaccines don't just kill/maim themselves, they also can lead to people who are allergic to vaccines, or otherwise cannot be vaccinated, to be infected with these controllable diseases?
Looks, I'll be the first in line to trash Facebook for all the things they do wrong. But just the same, I prefer to have an honest discussion about root issues. Facebook didn't tell him mom that vaccinations were bad. Stupid people using Facebook did.
If you don't want to use Facebook because they're not cracking down on anti-vaxxer crap, fine, boycott it. I'm surprised all the flaws about Facebook haven't led you to boycott it until now, in fact. But don't suggest that Facebook is at fault. They're not.
- Pacific Bell didn't call in the bomb threat.
- The US Postal Service didn't send someone anthrax.
- Highway 101 didn't stop you from getting to work on time.
These are all networks being used by people to do harmful (or at the very least, stupid) things. Go after them. Regulate them. Do the hard work and propose how we're supposed to, in the realm of free speech and the right to be wrong, regulate stupid people.
Morons just look for confirmation of their misconceptions. Ordinarily, I would not mind, but anti-vaxxers inflict serious harm on others, in particular on those that cannot be vaccinated for medical reason and on their own children, which clearly is child-abuse.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Actually being right is a huge advantage in convincing people that you're right."
That isn't my experience. Because it isn't enough to be right for the wrong reasons. You win people over with a strawman oversimplified version of the truth and then they very quickly get swayed by a slightly more informed person with the opposing view. The truth is usually complicated and grey and full of thousands of concessions to the other sides talking points that are crippling in SOUNDING right but essential to actually being right.
Very few people actually want to be right, they just want the people they are impressed with to be impressed with them and pretend that means they are right.
There are a large number of those who depend on herd immunity without it being a choice (IE they're immunocompromised or allergic to the appropriate vaccines). It's kinda like saying drunk driving is a self-correcting problem because drunk drivers are more likely to be in accidents than sober drivers.
What right is being taken away here? The right to be wrong? The right to believe any bullshit no matter how insane? The right to be an utter moron that's easily convinced because he's too stupid to tell when he's being bullshitted?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>Actually being right is a huge advantage in convincing people that you're right.
Unfortunately there are many studies that show otherwise. There's a reason cult de-programmers use strong appeal to emotion instead of logic, you can't 'logic' someone out of something they didn't 'logic' themselves into to begin with.
What do Anti-vaxers, flat earthers, Anti-gmo crusaders, and a certain branch of one of our main political parties all have in common? They get their information from Facebook.
All of these movements predate Facebook, sometimes by centuries.
There was strong resistance to smallpox inoculation in Britain, that was only somewhat reduced when the children of the royal family were inoculated in 1722.
Throughout the 19th century, there was religious opposition to vaccinations, and resistance to vaccinations today is strongest in muslim countries such as Pakistan where Facebook is not so pervasive.
The anti-GMO movement started in the 1990s, long before social media became common. Facebook was started in 2004.
Believe it or not, political extremism also predates Facebook. Seriously.
The Right of stupid people to say what they like? Yeah, I think that that fits. Note that once you've decided that stopping stupid people from saying whatever they like, it's pretty easy to expand the definition (gradually, mind you!) of "stupid people" till the government is restricting anything they don't want to hear in public.
And remember, you may agree with the gov at first, but sooner or later, their definition of "stupid people saying the wrong thing(s) in public" will include things YOU want to say in public....
No, I'm not anti-vax. I wish that measles had been available when *I* was an infant. Alas, I was four or five before it was developed, much less available to the general public, much less mandatory.
Nor am I pro-stupid-people. I am, however, rather fond of the First Amendment. And restricting speech I disagree with isn't one of the exceptions listed in the First....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Fuck the marketplace of ideas. If that concept had any merit, why is this the state of affairs in the Western world after practicing it for so many decades? Actually being right does not do much to convince the Average Joe that you're right, especially after they've sought out and indoctrinated themselves with beliefs that are wrong. We have disproved the marketplace of ideas through experiment, and our reality is the aftermath.
We need to use our freedoms to reduce the exposure of factually wrong and morally toxic ideas to the public rather than continuing to wait for the marketplace of ideas' invisible hand to lead people to the truth while it merely points out rabbit-holes to madness for vulnerable people to gleefully leap into. Call it corporate censorship if you like, but the alternatives are common carrier status or forced speech. Choose one.
It's also strange for someone who expresses such worry about corporate censorship to be so gung-ho about corporate and government propaganda campaigns.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Conversely, while now bipartisan, antivax started with and remains majority-owned by deranged California-style leftists.
No part of the political spectrum is proof from idiocy. With regard to antivaxxers? The real cause is indeed - god help me - fake news.
Anyone of a certain age remembered when eggs were good, then bad, then good. Wine is obviously bad, except it's good! Except no wait, it isn't!
Media has for decades tried to distill scientific studies into moronic sound bytes and unfortunately has succeeded. So of course there are people who now look at everything with suspicion - because scientists are so often wrong about, well, everything!
They aren't, of course, but you'd need to actually read findings rather than headlines to understand and ain't nobody got time to dat.
That is exactly the right being discussed. It's a fundamentally important right, because almost every statement we now consider correct was popularly considered batshit at some point, and vice versa. The world has certain immutable, objective truths, but it's ridiculous to think humans could ever know them with certainty.
Ah, the good old Nihilism argument. Because there's no absolute truth, everything is an opinion and the end. And all opinions are equally valid.
However, some opinions have resulted in us being able to converse about this nonsense over the internet at about the speed of light, while half a planet may be between us.
Don't you think these are a bit more desirable than those opinions that, to use one other extreme as an example, caused genocides?
Much like it's easier to keep your story straight when you're telling the truth.
At the amateur level, maybe. A well-thought-out and practiced lie, however, can easier to keep straight than the truth. Reality tends to be messy, and when people aren't deliberately trying to keep their story straight the details tend to get blurred. Stories that fit together unusually well often contain a fair bit of fiction—either deliberate deception or simple subconscious editing and rationalization.
It does help to have solid evidence on your side, if the people you're trying to convince are the type to be persuaded by the evidence. If not, your skills as a debater will matter far more than whether you're right or wrong.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
It would only be fairly mitigated if homeschooling meant keeping non-vaccinated children quarantined from society, which it doesn't.
And how did free speech get into this? There's been no talk of governments criminalizing anti-vaccine speech.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Don't worry too much about changing the minds of specific individuals. Instead, think about the drift of ideas between generations (the old definition of "memes" pre-2000). That is where the difference is made. You can't e.g. convince someone not to be racist, but you can change the statistical likelyhood of their kids being racist.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The Right of stupid people to say what they like? Yeah, I think that that fits. Note that once you've decided that stopping stupid people from saying whatever they like, it's pretty easy to expand the definition (gradually, mind you!) of "stupid people" till the government is restricting anything they don't want to hear in public.
And remember, you may agree with the gov at first, but sooner or later, their definition of "stupid people saying the wrong thing(s) in public" will include things YOU want to say in public....
No, I'm not anti-vax. I wish that measles had been available when *I* was an infant. Alas, I was four or five before it was developed, much less available to the general public, much less mandatory.
Nor am I pro-stupid-people. I am, however, rather fond of the First Amendment. And restricting speech I disagree with isn't one of the exceptions listed in the First....
However restricting speech that represents a clear and present danger has never been part of the first amendment... though I'm not about to claim to be smart (dumb?) enough to try to apply that outside of the most blindingly obvious examples.
My mom, rest her soul, was an anti-vaxxer (and a research Nurse no less). Facebook would let her spread that nonsense. It would give her a safe space to discuss it and get it reinforced.
Reinforcement's the big thing. My bro and I were just talking about the Dem primary. Based on his news feeds Kamala Harris is the front runner. Based on mine it's Bernie and Harris is dead in the water. The two of us had to do a mess of googling to get out of our bubbles.
That's because services like YouTube and Facebook are built to keep funneling content to you that your receptive of so they can get more "engagement" (e.g. eye on glass) and more ad impressions. It's real time and designed around sessions. Click a Bernie video and your feed blows up with Bernie. Click a gaming video and suddenly it's gaming. Whatever it takes to keep you clicking one more video.
True story, YouTube decided a buddy was trans. Apparently several of the Warhammer 40k players and painters he subscribed to were, and they'd done videos about the Trans issues they were facing on their 40k channels. I guess that's one way to get out of the Bubble. But baring that you really have to try to step out of it.
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Anti vaccination has occured for as long as vaccination existed.
And it's a sad tendency of some people who are short sighted to see a group of deranged people and then automatically assume they must belong to a disliked political party. It's a vain attempt to brand Favorite Party as always wholesome and good and Hated Party as only attracting deviants and the mentally ill.
If your goal is to score points with people who have the same political stance as you, then you can continue making peurile ad hominem attacks. But if you want to actually convince someone to your point of view (or *gasp* find common ground) then you need to use intelligent arguments.
Ah yet again, you asshats are losing and now all of a sudden you want to compromise and be open minded and whine about why we all can't get along. You conservatards are the bully crying uncle and pissing your panties because FINALLY we stood up and defended ourselves. I don't wanna fucking hear it. LAY IN THE BED YOU MADE ASSHOLE!
No, not really. There will always be some amount of misinformation out there. The problem is actually an evolutionary issue. Humans evolved over the millennia to trust what they can see, and to trust certain trusted individuals to provide information about what they can't. Their friends fall into that second category. And as long as their friends are properly informed, that system works reasonably well.
Historically, the main thing that prevented misinformation from getting broadly distributed to those friends was the cost of publishing it in the first place. Most people with enough money to do that were not complete idiots, so there was a built-in, largely financially motivated bulls**t filter.
With the rise of social media, the cost of distributing information (correct or incorrect) fell through the floor, and as a result, the need for someone at least moderately intelligent to conclude that the message has merit before spreading it far and wide no longer exists. Therefore, the opinions of intellectuals and complete bozos now have equal chance of being distributed far and wide, and the odds of your friends having incorrect information becomes significantly higher. So anyone who tends to trust those friends then goes on to repeat the bad information, and it spreads a lot like the plague.
In the absence of gatekeepers, your only real options are to either believe everything, disbelieve everything, or investigate everything yourself. Most people tend to fall into one of the first two categories, with the majority falling into the first one, leaving only a tiny minority of people constantly posting links to Snopes or whatever in a desperate attempt to stem the tide.
In other words, the real problem is that we haven't taught people enough about how to think critically, and the only viable fix for that is to instill in everyone a sufficiently sophisticated bulls**t meters. Any other solution, like specifically targeting "fake news", is basically just sticking your fingers in the dike as the water level inches closer and closer to going over the top rim.
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