It's long overdue to kick these COVID deniers and vaccine misinformation superspreaders off of social media. Amy Klobuchar and other Senators takes aim at 12 vaccine misinformation influencers Senators have written to Facebook and Twitter to ask about vaccine misinformation superspreaders. https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/4/1...isinformation-facebook-twitter-superspreaders As the Covid-19 vaccine rollout continues across the US, some lawmakers are concerned that ongoing misinformation and disinformation campaigns are exacerbating vaccine hesitancy. Now, two senators are turning their attention to the vaccine misinformation superspreaders that push the bulk of conspiracy theories and lies on social media — and asking the social media giants to take more aggressive action. “For too long, social media platforms have failed to adequately protect Americans by not taking sufficient action to prevent the spread of vaccine disinformation online,” wrote Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) in a Friday letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was viewed by Recode. “Despite your policies intended to prevent vaccine disinformation, many of these accounts continue to post content that reach millions of users, repeatedly violating your policies with impunity.” In particular, the senators urged the companies to take action against 12 anti-vaccine influencers — 11 individuals and one couple — who spread anti-vaccine content on the internet. These accounts include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed distrust in vaccines, and Joseph Mercola, an online alternative medicine proponent who was recently flagged by the Food and Drug Administration for promoting fake Covid-19 cures, including through his still-active Twitter account. These 12 entities were identified in a report published last month by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit focused on online hate and misinformation. To find these 12 influencers, researchers identified 10 private and 20 public anti-vaccine Facebook groups, whose sizes ranged between 2,500 and 235,000 members. The researchers then analyzed links posted in these groups and tracked the sources of their links. They found that up to 73 percent of that content, including posts sharing it across Facebook, came from websites affiliated with these 12 superspreaders, who have built reputations in the anti-vaccine online world through multiple accounts on various social media services. More broadly, up to 65 percent of anti-vaccine content on both Facebook and Twitter identified by the researchers seemed to come from these entities. At the time of the report’s publication in March, nine of these superspreaders were active on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In their Friday letter, the senators asked for more details on the platforms’ approach to content moderation, and for explanations of why the content shared by these 12 superspreaders does or does not violate Facebook’s and Twitter’s rules. The senators also sought more information on the companies’ investment in content moderation for communities of color, rural communities, and non-English speaking communities, pointing out that some of the content posted by the 12 superspreaders “targets Black and Latino communities with tailored anti-vaccine messages.” In response to the pandemic and the vaccine rollout, Facebook and Twitter have altered their approach to content moderation and health misinformation. Facebook, which also owns Instagram, has banned anti-vaccine misinformation and misinformation about Covid-19 that could lead to “imminent physical harm,” and the company says it has removed more than 12 million pieces of content that violate this threshold. Facebook has also conducted research into vaccine-hesitant comments on its service. “Working with leading health organizations, we’ve updated our policies to take action against accounts that break our Covid-19 and vaccine rules — including by reducing their distribution or removing them from our platform — and have already taken action against some of the groups in this report,” Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever told Recode. She added that the company had connected 2 billion people to resources from health authorities. Twitter has taken a two-pronged approach of removing the most harmful vaccine misinformation and labeling other misleading tweets. Generally, these approaches have focused on individual pieces of content, not the broader behavior of particular influencers across the internet. That means that vaccine misinformation superspreaders have more leeway to spread distrust without necessarily outright sharing false claims about vaccines. Instead, they can promote “health freedom” to encourage people to not get vaccinated, present vaccine news in a misleading light, use social media to link to misleading claims on their own websites, and simply raise questions in order to sow doubt.
Why do you want to cancel misinformation super spreaders GWB? This is just another example of cancel culture. Eliminate? That sounds very Maxine Waters-ish
Yet... the vaccine misinformation super-spreaders and their organizations keep showing up... Mysterious Medical Organizations Are Calling for an End to COVID Vaccines Blandly-named pseudo-medical organizations are promoting bad science, discredited drugs, and creating an industry of COVID denial. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7n...ions-are-calling-for-an-end-to-covid-vaccines The World Council for Health (WCH) is in no way what it sounds like, which is of course exactly the point. The organization’s website is set up to look like a public health nonprofit: a clean layout, a cheery little logo—a graphic of a hand inside an apple, a heart inlay inside the hand—and a bland mission statement, which proclaims that the group is “a worldwide coalition of health-focused organizations and civil society groups that seek to broaden public health knowledge and sense-making through science and shared wisdom.” There’s also a sprinkling of stock photos, prominently featuring Black women and children. In reality, the WCH is an umbrella group for purveyors of COVID misinformation. Its dozens of large and small “coalition partners,” among which are groups that are regularly in the headlines and ones working behind the scenes, are based all over the world. They share one thing: a devotion to casting doubt on COVID vaccines and promoting discredited treatments for the disease. In the past few months, the WCH has declared that COVID vaccines are “dangerous and ineffective,” released a nonsense guide to “spike protein detox” after vaccination (premised on the completely false idea that the vaccine somehow looses dangerous spike proteins in the body), misleadingly claimed that COVID vaccination is leading to increased heart issues in both adults and children, and called on its followers to be “the hands and feet of this global coalition” and deliver a petition against the vaccines to their local elected officials. The WCH isn’t alone. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a growing number of organizations, new and old, have devoted themselves to creating the perception that there are legitimate medical bodies who question the basic science of mask-wearing, social distancing, and vaccination. Some are older fringe medical groups that have thrown themselves into a new fight: The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, for instance, a group Senator Rand Paul belongs to, is a libertarian-leaning organization which has opposed mandatory vaccinations for children for years and made the false claim that abortions are linked to breast cancer. During the pandemic, the AAPS has opposed vaccine mandates and passports and suggested in a press release that COVID vaccines were leading to what they called an “unprecedented number of lethal and disabling complications reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).” (Anyone can report an unverified claim to VAERS, and misusing and misinterpreting VAERS data has become a cornerstone of the anti-vaccine movement.) Then there are newer, headline-attracting groups like America’s Frontline Doctors, which has promoted discredited COVID treatments like hydroxychloroquine and which is now, as the Intercept recently reported, teaming up with conservative sting group Project Veritas to spread COVID misinformation and harass medical regulators on-camera. In December, the group followed and confronted Kristina Lawson, the president of California’s medical board, which she called “a terrifying experience.” The Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, which was founded by Steve Kirsch—a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who spoke at January’s anti-vaccine rally in Washington, D.C.—has become, as the MIT Technology Review put it in October, a “misinformation superspreader.” (The organization’s name is extremely similar to that of the Foundation for Vaccine Research, which was founded in 2011 by actual scientists to advocate for more research and development for vaccines, especially for diseases like HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria that were, and are, ravaging developing countries.) There’s also the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, the fringe group whose main goal is the promotion of ivermectin, a drug which a recent randomized clinical trial found had no effectiveness as a COVID treatment. . The FLCCC is also a member of the World Council for Health; so is the BIRD Group, its British counterpart. The BIRD Group’s most prominent member is Dr. Tess Lawrie, who also sits on the WCH’s steering committee, alongside people like Mark Trozzi, an Ontario doctor who was barred in October from issuing medical exemptions for COVID vaccines, masks and tests. Indeed, many of the WCH “coalition partners” promote ivermectin; the organization also recently released a press release claiming that a Japanese study had proven the drug is effective against the Omicron variant. (In fact, the study was not conducted on human beings, and an incorrect Reuters story is the main thing fueling this particular claim.) There’s a reason why ivermectin features so prominently: The fine print on the WCH’s website reveals that it is an “initiative managed through EbMCsquared,” yet another ivermectin-promoting organization that Lawrie is affiliated with. The effect here is a bewildering nesting doll of jargon and affiliations, all designed to add up to look like something approaching medical consensus against vaccination and in favor of discredited treatments like ivermectin. Unlike most actual medical organizations, however, all of these groups take donations, often for very unclear ends; the WCH, for instance, which does not appear to be a 501c3 nonprofit, says donations will be used “as we chart a better way forward for world health.” The only video the WCH has uploaded to YouTube is similarly vague; against images of fluffy cumulus clouds, a series of worried-sounding sentences float by: “I need to talk about COVID-19,” one reads. “I need to know who is making the decisions for my health.” The anxious declaratives resolve into what’s meant to be a calming promise: “There’s a better way,” followed by the organization’s logo. The WCH also acknowledges that many of its partner organizations are “civil society groups,” meaning “health freedom” groups that exist mainly to oppose vaccine mandates, and aren’t run by medical professionals at all. They include outfits like Police For Freedom, a UK-based group whose aim appears to be advocating against vaccine mandates for police, and Nuremberg New Zealand, which promotes particularly extreme COVID-denying claims, and says it’s collecting the names of public officials who will ultimately be named in what it calls “the largest class action in New Zealand.” One thing that the WCH has undoubtedly achieved, though, is creating a sober-sounding organization for people to link to when they want to argue that some medical professionals oppose COVID vaccinations. Those people include Joseph Mercola, a longtime promoter of “natural health” and dubious treatments who has become a prolific promoter of COVID misinformation. Mercola wrote recently about the bullshit science of “spike protein detox”; the piece was little more than advertisement for the WCH and its “detox guide.” He then cited it again in another piece for the Epoch Times—always a hub of disinformation—in a piece that falsely referred to the vaccines as “gene transfer injections.” The anti-abortion website LifeSite News—which has also become a node for bad COVID information—has also cited the WCH, in an approving piece about its call to stop all COVID vaccines. (In a curious blurring of press release and article, LCH also ran something about the WCH’s launch that was shaped like news story, but bylined by Mark Trozzi, one of the WCH’s “steering committee” members.) The organization has been cropping up more and more frequently in other news sources, often ones that seem to rely on aggregation and web scraping. A Nigerian outfit called the Paradise News, for instance, posted an article about the WCH calling for an end to COVID vaccines that was simply a copy of bullet points taken directly from the WCH’s website.That not only creates content for the Paradise News; it helps populate the hall of mirrors needed to make the WCH look like a legitimate, widely-cited medical body. Well-known misinformation peddlers and conspiracy theorists have been, unsurprisingly, quick to start citing the WCH, including British lizard-person enthusiast David Icke and gynecologist-turned-vaccine opponent Christiane Northrup. But ordinary people are also slowly starting to cite the WCH as though it’s a legitimate medical body. On Facebook, a woman in Illinois claimed that her “nurse friend” had come up with a regimen for vitamins to take during COVID by relying on a number of sources, including the WCH. Another older woman in Kansas with a profile full of anti-vaccine posts shared a chart from the WCH that recommends taking a battery of things for COVID, including ivermectin, with the caption, “I hope this helps someone .” The slow seep from the world of medical conspiracy into mainstream social media has begun. There is some precedent here, but in the world of politics, not medicine. In 2017, as Buzzfeed journalist Charlie Warzel wrote at the time, an architecture of alternative news sources had emerged, all devoted to pushing a heroic story about Donald Trump. Warzel called it a “new media upside-down,” a place where the story was always about the Trump White House’s successes, framed to look like real, unbiased news. (“We've really created parallel institutions,” Mike Cernovich, a juice salesman turned men’s rights activist turned central “New Right” figure, told Warzel.) Today, the concept of a parallel institution is being put into energetic use to promote alternative, energetically twisted narratives about COVID and vaccination. Whenever the pandemic recedes, though, these groups and the architecture they’ve put in place will remain. Already, state-level anti-vaccine groups, animated by the pandemic, are using that new energy to try to push through anti-vax legislation. In the same way there’s no doubt that even after the pandemic ends, the WCH and outfits like it will remain just as devoted to promoting bad science, suspicion, and distrust. Their business model, after all, depends on it.
Damn loser, you have been posting all this shit and it turns out the CDC is withholding massive amounts of data.
Once again -- let's see why the CDC is not publishing all the raw data. We have already seen how anti-vaxxers deliberately misinterpret and pushing misinformation from the data-rich U.K. Covid information. Leading the U.K. recently to stop reporting some raw information daily and provide information in context over longer periods of time. Same issues in the U.S. -- which is why the CDC has been withholding some raw data it has collected. CDC withholding COVID data over fears of misinterpretation https://nypost.com/2022/02/22/cdc-withholding-covid-data-over-fears-of-misinterpretation/ The CDC has admitted it is withholding large portions of COVID-19 data — including on vaccine boosters — from the public because it fears the information could be misinterpreted. The leading public health agency has only published a small sample of the data it has been collecting — despite being two years into the pandemic, sources told the New York Times. Kristen Nordlund, a CDC spokeswoman, said the reason for the slow release of data is “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She added that the CDC’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.” But another reason is that the data could be misinterpreted by the public, Nordlund admitted. Among the data that has been collected but not made public is hospitalizations broken down by age, race and vaccination status over the last year and information on the effectiveness of booster shots. When the CDC released data on the effectiveness of boosters for adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it did not include full numbers on those between 18 and 49. That data showed the booster shots were least likely to benefit younger adults because two shots of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, or one dose of Johnson & Johnson, already left them well protected. The CDC has also only just started releasing data on whether COVID is present in wastewater — even though some states have been providing figures since the beginning of the pandemic. Wastewater data can help public health officials predict whether there will be an influx of COVID-19 cases. According to one CDC official, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the COVID pandemic has revealed how outdated the agency and other state-level health systems had become.
Covid Misinformation/Disinformation is impossible to eliminate. Heck, even social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Spotify, or whatever have algorithms and they still can't eliminate the Covid Misinformation/Disinformation after catering and welcoming it for views, followers, and money. The main reason why it can't be eliminated... it's become too Political when it never should have. wrbtrader
It's not just the CDC, almost every state is withholding data from its Covid dashboard although on the surface it looks like they're giving out a lot of data. For example, I compare the typical data being shown in the United States to other countries and I keep wondering why the U.S. show such basic raw data when I know they have the info as if they're not willing to do the calculations. It's tough to find data like the average hospital stay of a vaccinated breakthrough Covid infected patient versus the hospital stay of a not vaccinated Covid infected patient versus the hospital stay of a genome sequenced verified reinfected Covid patient. Yet, the data is much easier to find in other countries. Instead, it's easier to find in the U.S. statements by Doctors and Nurses about what they're seeing at their hospitals. The failed genomic sequencing statistics of analysis of the U.S. Covid tests, failed contact tracing in the U.S. while other countries are miles ahead in that category and the wastewater issue was suspicious from the beginning while other countries talked about it a lot. Another suspicious issue...other countries have data about Zoonosis that results in destroying large groups of Covid infected farm animals that became severely sick with Covid while it seems very strange that such is not occurring in the United States... It's as if the U.S. doesn't want to alarm anyone that Covid is in the meat supply. Yet, at the same time, we hear the news of meat plants shutting down temporarily because of a breakout of Covid infected employees at the meat plants that handle the countries meat supply. Think about this carefully, how often do we hear about recalls of food products that are infected with something like e.coli in the U.S. and in other countries while not hearing anything about Covid in the U.S. food supply while hearing about it in farm animals in other countries. Yet, we hear lots of stories about people who became infected with Covid prior to vaccination that consistently say they don't understand how they got infected when they wore their face mask, they follow the social distancing rules and they didn't let anyone into their homes...and then there are all the outbreaks at schools. This to me implies it's not just the CDC, it's the FDA, Wastewater regulators, State's Public Health Agencies not disclosing all the raw data... In my opinion, this Pandemic is a lot worst than we knew about and its one of the reasons why I decided to become fully vaccinated and boosted plus I had a complete physical / blood chemistry work prior to each vaccination dose... Again the same medical exams about 30 days after each vaccination dose considering I have medical allergies since childhood. That's another issue I've mentioned many times here at the forum...there's literally no recommendation on TV, in the media nor at vaccination centers about ensuring you're suitable for vaccination. The only thing I saw was a questionnaire on paper of health questions to millions of people prior to them getting vaccinated. There's a well-known health concern because people that are sick with Covid should not be getting vaccinated because these types of people increases their risk of negative immune response and severe illness after vaccination. Seriously, has anyone seen anybody get a Covid test at a vaccination center or at their doctor's office prior to the person getting their vaccination shot ??? Instead, they are only asked a question...are you sick ? wrbtrader
Want to eliminate vaccine misinformation and lies? Then, stop posting GWB, you are the single, biggest source of lies and disinformation on practically, anything on the ET message boards. ExGoper is probably, 2nd to you. Other extreme liberal trolls also, spreading lies and disinformation. You ET trolls are all useless slugs, proven liars and nothing more.