[data_acquired]

Notable blurb from the report itself ---

"However, whilst this approach [content removal] may be effective and essential for illegal content (eg hate speech, terrorist content, child sexual abuse material) there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of this approach for scientific misinformation, and approaches to addressing the amplification of misinformation may be more effective. In addition, demonstrating a causal link between online misinformation and offline harm is difficult to achieve [25, 26], and there is a risk that content removal may cause more harm than good by driving misinformation content (and people who may act upon it) towards harder-to-address corners of the internet27."

I'm happy that this point has been raised in this report. Lot of understandable hand-wringing and fear about online misinformation about over COVID, but it was never clear to me that online misinformation is a variable that explains differences in vaccination rates across countries, or to what extent it affects an individual's decision not to vaccinate. Turns out that this is hard to measure.

The CDC messaging was really bad and problematic on several counts right from the get go. Its not like the US is incapable of messaging about the link between individual behaviour and societal good in the long term (for instance, there were initial protracted battles, but we eventually agreed largely on condoms and HIV, or smoking and lung cancer risk) or in the short term (as in the lifestyle sacrifices that WWII engendered for wartime production). I wonder what went right in those situations (if they did go right) that went wrong in the messaging this time around.

Over and above the masking, some observations --

1. Transmission risk, I think, was never the primary end-point of vaccine development, but rather, to prevent hospitalization. But the messaging from CDC and others on the vaccine implied that transmission would keep declining with increasing vaccination rates, which turned out to be true only to a limited extent.

2. The early messaging was that this would be one wave of infections, and that one round of vaccination would end it all. This was tough to defend given what happened with the flu. I understand that telling people that "Well, the vaccine may not give long-lasting immunity and still leave you susceptible" is not going to promote vaccination, but perhaps emphasizing that vaccine-immunity is controlled and safe than an infection that might hit all organs, would have been a better way out?

[bigodbiel]

Personally the CDC’s greatest sin was their narrative push against natural immunity. And sadly it was repeated as infinitum by the media. One paper with an incredibly misleading title and another so problematic that one can only wonder how it got even published. But the media and “science communicators” didn’t think twice in praising them and compounding on those same lies.

More recently another paper on covid and childhood diabetes (cause now they’ve gotta push the jabs on the young ones) has been causing the same level of scrutiny.

This isn’t science anymore.

[bloaf]

Don't forget the flawed test kits the CDC sent out at first: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/06/929078678/cdc-report-official...

I agree that the link between online misinformation and real world harms is tough to measure. I've read some studies of radicalization that found meatspace was the primary avenue for radicalizing, even if cyperspace allowed extremist groups to raise more awareness, and I suspect the same is currently true here.

However, I don't think this is some "constant of human nature" and is more likely an accident of our current society. As people grow up with and on the internet, I would expect this to change: I would expect the link between online communication and radicalization to strengthen over time.