The power and prepotency of social media prolonged a pandemic and upended lives…
There is no doubt COVID-19 was going to be a disastrous catastrophe for an extended period, as we have now come to recognize. Though failed, ineffectual leadership has led to this failure in mitigation, social media’s deleterious effect on the population has come to breed an altogether innovatory proclivity.
https://newrepublic.com/article/163319/covid-vaccine-hesitancy-denial-misinformation-poverty
I think there was this idea that when the Trump administration left office, the general population would take confidence in a more competent and experienced White House. On the outset this seemed plausible; but, as we have learned more than ever before in the last year and a half, we have, unfortunately, seen a very troubling descent into a complex and volatile reality.
Consider The New Republic piece by Melody Schreiber, in which she lays out the very troubling realization that so many communities are unable to absorb facts and credible information because they are essentially targeted by these social media disinformation campaigns.
“The inability to access and evaluate quality information can lead to what health researcher Dr. Jessica Jaiswal calls “inequality-driven mistrust.” If you don’t make much money, you may not have reliable internet access or news subscriptions. If you have lower levels of education, it’s harder to make sense of the (often false or misleading) information you find out there. You may be wary of doctors and government officials because of the way they’ve mistreated you in the past, and you may fear you’ll be charged for the shot if you don’t have insurance. Going, say, door-to-door with vaccines solves only one issue of access; if you don’t have trusted sources of information offering good reasons to accept it, you might still refuse a shot.”
One might argue that we have seen a shift within the norms of what so many now regard as normal. With so many news sources, all of which charge fees for their content — as well as a materialization of the immoral and superfluous term formed by Trump: fake news — people are no longer wanting to turn to facts that have been defined and proven by medical professionals, scientists, and other officials. Instead, we have shifted into this actuality where people are driven by their ability to receive information from social media platforms, and from people on these platforms who have no qualifications to give out advice or recommendations.
Bergstrom recently coauthored a study about how the internet and social media brought rapid, unprecedented change to our information ecosystems and our social systems, fostering the speedy global spread of disinformation and misinformation — with enormous implications for health and science. This spread can be incredibly damaging in normal times and disastrous during a pandemic. “People’s behavior on social media is directly shaping the way that the United States is able to emerge from this pandemic or the way it fails,” he said.
There is a strong, organized movement to undermine confidence in science and vaccines, and to push anti-vaccine propaganda at those who suffer from low-quality information, especially on social media, according to Bergstrom. “That propaganda is, of course, convincing people not to get vaccinated, putting their own lives at risk, and then also allowing them to serve as links in transmission chains,” he said.
Invariably, whether people want to accept it or not, the successes of our nation are entrenched in how we function together through a crisis. It’s easy to ascertain that your existence will be safe within a bubble of security and protection; the realization, however, is that it takes unconditional cooperation. Consider this: the delta variant, which has been resistant to the vaccine, rapidly gained steam because so many resisted the vaccination. Again, while it may have always been the case that the variant would resist the vaccine’s effectiveness, it has progressively moved within these vulnerable communities because people allowed it to do so.
“The problem is usually not that the unvaccinated haven’t gotten information. It’s that the information is often wrong, and there’s far too much of it. Sifting through the endless studies, news reports, and guidance documents on Covid, not to mention all of the false theories and ideas out there, is daunting. “A lot of it has to do with this information overload that we’re subjected to on a day-to-day basis, and it’s nearly impossible to make sense of that, given all the cognitive biases that we have,” said Rory Smith, research manager at First Draft, a nonprofit focused on combating disinformation and misinformation. And “we’re really behind in terms of thinking critically, in terms of looking at sources and deciding which ones are reliable and which are not.”
It’s unexacting to say this: the federal and state government should palliate this problem; they should provide a solution to end this pandemic. But this is not the reality of where we stand in this ordeal. We see, more than ever before, the recondite defiance communities are wielding on their leaders. Just here in San Diego, yesterday, protestors and anti-vaxxers spent 15 hours grilling local authorities as to why they were not allowed to deem “misinformation” as valid. These folks cited their constitutional rights; referenced organizing an army to subjugate the systems in place. Where in the constitution does it state that these people should be allowed to obstruct public health?
