bcude
Master Don Juan
- Joined
- May 31, 2019
- Messages
- 762
- Reaction score
- 1,219
- Age
- 44
“Attention grabbing headlines with sensationalist content can attract even the savviest internet users and studies have shown they tend to generate more user engagement”, warned the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, in July, 2020. “As a result, content personalisation algorithms can repeatedly expose people to the same or similar content and ads even on the basis of disinformation.”
This is how social media works to keep users engaged and what people like @stovepipe fall victim to. He's so far down the rabbit hole of the conspiracy theories that no amount of facts to the contrary will convince him otherwise, and he's far from alone.
I took this flat earth movement as a hilarious joke, until i noticed that a surprising large amount of people were actually serious about it and it was followed by 'pizzagate', and here we are again. Now vaccines are supposedly dangerous to our health and we're not supposed to trust facts, governments and professionals instead get lost in conspiracy stories and delusions that ultimately threaten our democracy.
This is just showing how dangerous social media has become on a global scale, since it's business model thrives on keeping people engaged at all costs, truth or not is irrelevant.
Medicines are not sugar pills, they're potent, good and bad, they have effects and side-effects. That's why they don't sell them as candy in the grocery store. That there are risks involved with all medicines is a price we have to pay in the times we live in now, times of advanced science and not in the middle age.
What we do know is that 77 million people have caught Covid-19 and 2 million have died from it. It's caused severe, traumatized illness for many who survived, teared down medical personnel and postponed healthcare for people with other serious illnesses.
Lockdowns have led to more isolation, depression and lost school years. The economic fall has to led to people losing their income, life's work and risk of losing their homes.
The fact that now, less than a year from the discovery of the pandemic, there are multiple vaccines that give us the chance to reach herd immunity under 2021 is quite an amazing achievement, but that assumes that the majority of people actually will take the vaccine.
If everything goes to plan then the success of Covid-19 can help to stop the anti-vaxxers destructive movement on the internet, which would save many lives in the future.
"A paper published in Nature earlier this year mapped online views on vaccination. The authors concluded that “although smaller in overall size, anti-vaccination clusters manage to become highly entangled with undecided clusters in the main online network, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are more peripheral”. They warned that in a decade the anti-vaccination movement could overwhelm pro-vaccination voices online. If that came to pass, the consequences would stretch far beyond COVID-19."
Source: The online anti-vaccine movement in the age of COVID-19
This is how social media works to keep users engaged and what people like @stovepipe fall victim to. He's so far down the rabbit hole of the conspiracy theories that no amount of facts to the contrary will convince him otherwise, and he's far from alone.
I took this flat earth movement as a hilarious joke, until i noticed that a surprising large amount of people were actually serious about it and it was followed by 'pizzagate', and here we are again. Now vaccines are supposedly dangerous to our health and we're not supposed to trust facts, governments and professionals instead get lost in conspiracy stories and delusions that ultimately threaten our democracy.
This is just showing how dangerous social media has become on a global scale, since it's business model thrives on keeping people engaged at all costs, truth or not is irrelevant.
Medicines are not sugar pills, they're potent, good and bad, they have effects and side-effects. That's why they don't sell them as candy in the grocery store. That there are risks involved with all medicines is a price we have to pay in the times we live in now, times of advanced science and not in the middle age.
What we do know is that 77 million people have caught Covid-19 and 2 million have died from it. It's caused severe, traumatized illness for many who survived, teared down medical personnel and postponed healthcare for people with other serious illnesses.
Lockdowns have led to more isolation, depression and lost school years. The economic fall has to led to people losing their income, life's work and risk of losing their homes.
The fact that now, less than a year from the discovery of the pandemic, there are multiple vaccines that give us the chance to reach herd immunity under 2021 is quite an amazing achievement, but that assumes that the majority of people actually will take the vaccine.
If everything goes to plan then the success of Covid-19 can help to stop the anti-vaxxers destructive movement on the internet, which would save many lives in the future.
"A paper published in Nature earlier this year mapped online views on vaccination. The authors concluded that “although smaller in overall size, anti-vaccination clusters manage to become highly entangled with undecided clusters in the main online network, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are more peripheral”. They warned that in a decade the anti-vaccination movement could overwhelm pro-vaccination voices online. If that came to pass, the consequences would stretch far beyond COVID-19."
Source: The online anti-vaccine movement in the age of COVID-19
