Vaccine misinformation, which first began spiraling during the Covid-19 pandemic, has grown in the United States in the years since, according to a new survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
People don’t trust the government anymore, which leads them to not trust institutions. Capitalism and corruption has made society the Wild West where every individual is looking out for themselves.
Basically if there is another pandemic we are going to be screwed.
I mean, yea, we’ll do what we can, but frankly, if we’re listening to you, then we weren’t part of the problem in the first place.
This is akin to global warming, and while it is important for every individual to contribute what help they can to the problem (reduce, reuse, recycle is still helpful and probably always will be), we also require both technical and legal tools to combat this problem effectively.
Legal tools are progressing at the usual snails pace, social media companies are under steadily mounting pressure, like lawsuits from bipartisan coalitions of states, that’s a pretty big legal volley. Technical tools are progressing as well, we’re actually all a part of a partial solution right here. Though we’ll need more of both kinds of tools, of course.
The last piece of the puzzle is how to deter hostile actors from creating misinformation firehoses in the first place. Non-state actors are an endless headache. China is hard to touch. Russia though … not so much. Slava Ukraini.
The comparison to global warming is a bit misleading. Vaccination rates depend wholly on individuals to take action. Climate change, on the other hand, requires corporations to act; individual actions, while helpful, will change nothing as long as corporations continue to operate as they always have.
My comment was in reference to online misinformation in general, as opposed to just vaccination rates. I was actually rhetorically replying directly to the Attorney General, who asked citizens to help stop spreading misinformation in the article.
I actually see quite a few parallels between air pollution and … maybe “information pollution”, perhaps?
