![]() Echo chambers exploit the vulnerability of people’s inherent tendency to believe in and share fake news. It isn’t long before they end up in an epistemic bubble, and consequently, an echo chamber, where they end up actively reading and believing in alternative facts, surrounding themselves with people who agree, and preparing themselves to discredit any outside source of information. Youtube’s algorithm pushes people down rabbit holes with its associative linking. The same mode of analysis can be applied to political discourse, with even more interesting results. Reaching herd immunity may seem easy, but breaking it down is far easier. Notably, it can only take a few parents flipping from pro-vaccine to anti-vaccine to push vaccination rates down to dangerous levels. The key portion of the population is the persuadable middle - people trying to do the right thing but who are often vulnerable to such misinformation floating around social media. ![]() There often is a small minority of the population that stands in staunch opposition to vaccines as well as a majority who are willing to undertake vaccination whose confidence in immunizations is staunch and unwavering. Most of these messages seeking to undermine vaccines usually bounce around echo chambers, but once they go mainstream, they become dangerous. ![]() The public’s confidence in vaccines has consistently declined over time, and those that oppose vaccines have gained ground thanks to the nature of social media platforms. One of the key factors for the faltering vaccine uptake numbers, he stated, was “all that anti-vax stuff” on the internet. Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid out a comprehensive plan to tackle the resurgent measles outbreak in 2019. A 2019 article published in The Lancet identified one key factor behind the increasing number of cases: a reduction in coverage of the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccines due to lowered vaccine uptake. In the U.S., they rose to 1,282 in 2019, the largest outbreak since 1992. and Europe faced sudden outbreaks of measles.Īnnual measles cases had risen to 991 in the U.K. usually backed away from taking down posts unless they included pornography, terrorism threats, or abuse.Ģ0 were a wake-up call for such platforms when the U.S. ![]() Backed by the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and Section 230’s protection of social media giants from liability for published content, social media platforms in the U.S. may be the perfect example of what social media can do in political discourse and how it can impact society.īefore 2018, misinformation, meaning wrong information without the intent of harm, and disinformation, meaning wrong information spread with an intent of harm, were rampant in social media circles with little intervention from the platforms that hosted them. ![]() Recently, this movement vilifying vaccines has shifted to the mainstream, exposing a bigger issue with social media and politics. Yet, this is not a coronavirus-specific phenomenon, as vaccines as a whole have been consistently maligned and denigrated by misinformation as instruments of oppression by the state. When a reporter asked him what his message was to companies like Facebook on the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, he said, “They’re killing people.”īiden doubled down his stance on misinformation two days later, not in an effort to attack Facebook, but rather to motivate the platform to crack down on the “ Disinformation Dozen” - the 12 people deemed responsible for 65% of the COVID-19 misinformation spreading on major social media platforms. On July 17, President Joe Biden decided to approach the press flock gathered on the Rose Garden before boarding his helicopter. ![]()
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