This appeared last week in Australia:
‘I was afraid I was going to die’: Misinformation fuels vaccine hesitancy
By Jewel Topsfield
October 5, 2021 — 5.00am
Margaret Thanos was so overwhelmed by what she had read online about whether it was safe for young people her age to get the AstraZeneca vaccine she found herself sobbing outside the chemist on the day of her injection.
“The fear from what I had heard and online misinformation meant I was afraid I was going to die even though statistically it’s so unlikely,” says Ms Thanos, a 21-year-old artist, who is now fully vaccinated.
COVID-19 is regarded as the first pandemic of the social media age, according to a global report by girls’ equality charity Plan International, which surveyed more than 26,000 girls and young women from 26 countries and found false information was severely impacting their lives.
In Australia, 95 per cent of the 1001 girls and young women surveyed said they were concerned about misinformation or disinformation online, while 83 per cent said they had been exposed to false or misleading information. (While misinformation and disinformation both refer to wrong or false information, only disinformation is deliberately misleading.)
More than half said that misinformation, lies and conspiracies about COVID-19 were most prevalent, followed by climate change (38 per cent) and racial justice (37 per cent).
The majority (59 per cent) believed that Facebook was the social media platform with the most misinformation/disinformation, followed by TikTok, Instagram and Twitter.
Ms Thanos said her social media feed had been filled with people questioning what was in the vaccine and promoting alternative methods of treating the virus with vitamins.
“People were kind of perpetuating the idea that the vaccines aren’t safe or you should know what’s in your vaccine, despite the fact that I didn’t know what was in every other vaccine that I’ve had in my lifetime,” said Ms Thanos, who is a Plan International Australia youth activist.
“I think it definitely started with the government messaging being filtered through the media, which basically made it sound like if you were a young person it was absolutely not safe at all to get AstraZeneca, and then they kind of did a bit of a 180.”
Ultimately, Ms Thanos overcame her vaccine hesitancy after the death of someone her age from COVID-19 in Sydney prompted her to conduct her own research and look at studies that reassured her that her risk of dying from the AstraZeneca vaccine was one in a million.
“Generally I would say that my Facebook ideological bubble is very left wing, very feminist, so the fact that anti-vaxxers and medical misinformation, which seems like a very right-wing thing, could permeate itself all the way through to my feed scares me.”
Facebook spokesperson Kate Hayes said the company was working hard to combat all forms of misinformation and since the start of the pandemic had removed 20 million pieces of harmful misinformation for violating its policies.
More here:
While overseas we had this:
Oct 6, 2021 ,06:25pm EDT|274 views
1 In 10 Americans Turn To Social Media For Health Information, New Survey Shows
Amid culture wars over masking, Covid-19 treatments, and vaccine mandates, many Americans are at a loss for who to trust when it comes to healthcare information.
With Facebook under new fire for putting profits over people based on a whistleblower’s testimony before Congress, it’s a wonder that anyone trusts social media platforms at all, especially in a healthcare context.
But according to new data released this week from PatientsLikeMe, an online patient community, 11% of Americans surveyed said they turn to social media when looking for reliable health information. Nearly one in ten (9%) also said they use social media to evaluate new treatment options and 7% seek information about medication side effects from social media.
While these numbers are relatively small, they represent a substantially higher proportion of respondents than the share that says they trust social media for health information. That group was just 2% of respondents.
In other words, many more people use social media to find health information than trust social media to provide reliable health information.
Wariness of health information found on social media doesn’t necessarily translate into caution about other sources of health information online.
Many people’s first instinct is to turn to Google to find information about a health condition and treatments. Nearly one-quarter of consumers surveyed said they use search engines to evaluate new treatment options and 29% use search engines for medication side effect information.
More here:
So here we have real anxiety and distress being caused by social media information and in the US we see that the use of such resources for health decision making is by no means rare
It is so true what Dr Karl says saying for such important information you trust genuine Government web sites and not ‘Kevin on Facebook!’
To me a larger question is just who is inventing all these stories and convincing people to post them. Such stories as a vaccine will alter your genes, kill you in 5 years after the dose or is a method Bill Gates is using to gain World Domination!
I can’t see any obvious beneficiaries of these myths and misinformation and really wonder what crazy ways of thinking inspire such rubbish.
Do you understand why and if understanding might help just improve what is done about it so girls like Margaret are not put through the distress the misinformation causes.
Any
ideas who wins here? At least one suggestion I have seen is that it is all to do with those in the shadows and creating the falsities are selling all sorts of supplements etc. that the anti-vaxxers want. Could be true I guess. Always good to 'follow he money;!
David.
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