Comment by tcd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tcd | Hacker News Reader

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Even the news outlets themselves are the ones spreading fear and non-substantiated claims. Just look into BBC's reporting of Molly Russell and how they use words like "Instagram helped kill my daughter", in quotes, to try and add substance to their piece.

They are willing to lay the blame squarely at Instagram's foot and yet offer no critical analysis of how her dad or teachers or society may have failed to help her - she may have tried reaching out, or showed signs of distress, but that's just glossed over because fuck instagram, they clearly have all the blame.

And that's a very dangerous narrative that people soak up - no critical thought, no attempt to try and offer thoughtful analysis whatsoever.

Those of us wise enough can see through their ploy, the agenda's they push, the propaganda they peddle. Just look into the BBC during the last election and you'll soon understand that disinformation, or out of context reporting is everywhere. Videos, quotes, images and basically all speech is being manipulated, to lure an unsuspecting reader into believing what they're ingesting, and has happened since civilization began.

YOU, as a human being, need to analyze and think about what you believe; are masks "ineffective" during this pandemic? News sources will tell you yes, others with experience will tell you no.

Stop relying on bots and algorithms to try and fill your world view, they're geared to feed you what you want to believe.

> Stop relying on bots and algorithms to try and fill your world view, they're geared to feed you what you want to believe.

That's super good advice and it would be actionable too if only we knew who are the bots and what the algorithms do. But presence/absence of the filter bubble need not be disclosed, bots are plentiful but masquerade as regular accounts and plenty of bots are meatware or the gullible themselves spreading the mental malware like any other infection.

The mainstream media here in the UK have also been misleading people into thinking sites like Facebook are to blame for a measles vaccination crisis they themselves created. About two decades ago the entire British press repeated bogus claims by a certain Dr Wakefield that caused a massive dip in MMR vaccinations, and now that gap in vaccinations is in danger of creating a measles epidemic. Sites like the BBC blamed this on antivaxxer communities on Facebook, quoting childhood vaccination statistics out of context to make it sound like there'd been a massive dip recently when in reality the percentage of kids getting their MMR vaccines in the UK had hit an all-time record high in 2017 and barely dropped since.

Was it obvious at the time that Wakefield‘s claims were bogus, or did that come out after the initial media panic? I don’t blame non-scientist reporters from believing an apparently-credible study, but I would blame them if they continued to push the debunked position after consensus had debunked it. Clearly the current Facebook groups have no such excuse.

The full extent of Wakefield's abuses didn't come out until later but it was clear at the time that the research did not support Wakefield's claims. Even if you ignored the methodology and simply accept the study's results, what it found was that the measles virus was present in the guts of 12 children with autism. This does not support the conclusion that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine (nor that the single vaccine Wakefield was promoting would be better). And indeed is too small scale to suggest much of anything except perhaps more research. At the press conference Wakefield was the only researcher suggesting MMR should be stopped.

The Private Eye and the Daily Mail were the ones to take the story and run with it. Turning it into a political "Wakefield vs. The Establishment" fight, rather than a scientific one.

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