We Must Prepare for the Next Pandemic

This is the one time I vehemently disagree with Schneier. Creating mass censorship infrastructure to automatically ban stuff that isn't "truthy" can easily be abused for totalitarian ends. He's right that it would be easier to set up such infrastructure if you have an apolitical pretext, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.

Well, on the other hand: if there was a Pandemic, Google and Facebook are trusted enough to put some kind of official info out there that could help to mitigate the problem. I’m by no means a Google or FB fan, but if they showed a big banner on their websites what to do to deal with the Pandemic, many people would probably consider it legit.

In the U.S. we have a medical system where people avoid going to the doctor for fear of cost. I feel like this is not the best system to have in a pandemic or epidemic situation.

When I saw the title, I was expecting an article about how we need to: educate citizens ahead of time about the different ways that disease can spread ensuring they don't fall prey to misinformation, fund more research for monitoring and mitigation, invest in stuff like "you need to let your employees work from home if there's a pandemic if possible, you need to emphasize to healthcare and transportation workers that in an emergency they are going to be needed the way that soldiers are needed in wartime and pay them extra".

But, it's just another demand for everyone to build a permanent apparatus to censor every communication that doesn't come from a very official and accurate source such as the publisher or the author's employer. This line of thinking is basically saying that democracy is a failure -- that most people are a bunch of easily deluded simpletons who have to be herded around for their own good, and they can't even learn ahead of time what they might need to know in a pandemic. Maybe that's part of the answer to a very important question behind all this, which is "why are people losing trust in society's most basic institutions, even when they're right?"

We're not even acknowledging that climate change exists despite 99.999% of scientists agreeing.

Hoping that we'll actually prepare for a pandemic seems remarkably long sighted for such a short sighted species as ours.

>> Much of it will be well-intentioned but wrong — like the misinformation spread by the anti-vaccination community today — but some of it may be malicious.

Well, a lot of the misinformation about vaccines has clear financial motives: it's spread by people selling "natural" remedies, homeopathic "vaccines" and so on or making their living by writing books and speaking in talk shows etc.

So not at all well-intentioned, I'd say.

SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING.