Here is Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times today:
Researchers who study vaccine hesitancy say that social networks play a huge role in the spread of dangerous lies about vaccines.
Hmmm. Clicking the link brings up an article by the authors of one of these studies. Here's what it says:
We found that the use of social media to organise offline action is strongly associated with the perception that vaccinations are unsafe.
That's a rather different claim, so let's take a look at the study itself. Here's the main result:
This requires some unpacking. The authors used a panel of experts to rank countries based on "average people’s use of social media to organise offline action." Each country was ranked from one to five. So what the top red oval tells us is that a difference of one rank (say, between 3 and 4) increases the belief that vaccines are unsafe by 1.437 percentage points. The bottom oval shows R², a statistical measure of how much this explains. In this case, changes in rank explain about a fifth of a country's belief in the safety of vaccines.
That may seem like a fair distance from a "huge role," but wait. It gets worse. The entire study is based on a convenience sample of tweets worldwide. And it's all limited to the years 2018-19, which means it's a measure of generic anti-vaxx sentiment. It has nothing specifically to do with COVID-19 vaccines.
Generally speaking, this study relies on so many different measurements, each with its own drawbacks and error bars, that it strikes me as a bit of a dog's breakfast. Still, it's a decent effort that points the way for future studies. That's not the problem.
The problem is that the authors pretty clearly implied a stronger result than they actually have. Manjoo then took that and exaggerated it even further. What we end up with is a claim that social media plays a "huge role" in vaccine disinformation when the study in question pretty clearly suggests exactly the opposite: a fairly modest effect of—maybe—a few percentage points in public attitudes. Thus are internet legends born.
POSTSCRIPT: The study uses the same methodology to look at foreign disinformation and finds a somewhat stronger effect. However, since this is based on 2018-19 data, it provides no clue about the real-world effect of this on the COVID-19 vaccine. This is why I ignored it.
Sorry couldn't really follow your technical argument -- Fox news blaring on the TV was too distracting.
Different backgrounds, different assumptions going into data interpretations.
Simple experiments, R^2 = 0.2 means you don't have a meaningful fit.
Complex systems, then maybe that one variable contributes to the results.
Internet legend Kevin Drum: Study saying social media spread vax disinformation provides no clue about the real-world effect on the COVID-19 vaccine.
Ron Klain: “I’ve told Mark Zuckerberg directly that when we gather groups of people who are not vaccinated and we ask them, why aren’t you vaccinated, and they tell us things that are wrong, we ask them where they’ve heard that, the most common answer is Facebook.”
https://twitter.com/RonBrownstein/status/1416224981147602944?s=20
Who's the dog and what did he eat for breakfast?
I get it. Kevin's on record saying Fox is the real culprit and any evidence showing social media plays an outsized role must be doubted. Why not just say there are multiple sources of disinformation that ought to be confronted?
Facebook is becoming the "people say" answer. Who? "Lots of people". "Everybody knows" etc...
My guess is Kevin has a lot more time to look into the details of this topic than Biden's chief of staff.
But less idea what he's doing and unlike Drum and his team of useless felines Klain actually has people whose job it is to do the work.
Uh, I think you've got this 180° backward: I'm quite, quite sure that it is Hilbert and Hopper, the aforesaid felines, who find _you_ useless.
Word to the wise: Don't piss off teh Kittehs. They move in realms far beyond your ken.
Look, like everything it helps when you see the same phenomenon in a different context.
How many people in the US die every year from smoking or excess alcohol or drugs? Those people were no uninformed about the consequences. It was not the fault of "society" or "Fox News" or "Facebook" that they became addicts. They engaged in stupid behavior for a variety of reasons, mostly because they had stupid friends, but also because they had stupid enablers in the media and on the internet. There is no real difference between the anti-vaxxer and the person complaining about drug laws -- both have their heads so far up their asses they cannot see anything but their own tiny slice of reality.
Annual US smoking deaths year after year every year match covid deaths last year. That's the power of stupidity. Every case of covid death from an idiot who was told the disease is not real, or vaccines don't work, has a matching case of an overdose death from an idiot told addiction is no big deal, or the whole drug war is just a hoax to keep black people down.
The exact same pathologies exist on the left as on the right -- because, big surprise, both sides are inhabited by people!
I agree with much of what you say here. But let's not underestimate the power of marketing and media in this.
Tobacco and alcohol, though subject to some legal restrictions, are aggressively marketed. The deaths they produce are in part attributable to, and the moral responsibility of the industries that push these lethal products on susceptible people.
To the extent that major media are also being used to push vaccine resistance or outright covid denial messages, at industrial scale, to susceptible people, those media organizations, too, bear partial moral responsibility for the fatal consequences born by their marks.
Yeah, it was, uncharacteristically, a dumb column. Facebook sucks.
Meanwhile, Schumer is doing a great job tightening the screws on infrastructure, isn't he? Of course the GOP doesn't have many cards to play and Trump only left them in a worse position, bless his little (emphasis on little) heart.
Schumer wants to tighten the screws so "infrastructure" goes on reconciliation. That would cut down discretionary spending down on a bunch of junk.
Given that the GOP plan is to run out the clock and pass nothing, then claim the Biden administration is a do-nothing administration, Schumer has them scared out of their wits.
For the diehard Trumpist base, spreading specific items of information or disinformation is probably not very important. The critical thing they need to know is basically what is the wingnut party line? Millions of people are refusing vaccination because it is a signal of belonging to the cult. They do need to know what to use as excuse, but these things can be picked up in several ways. Some people just make up their own weird excuses.
There are pre-covid anti-vax cults also. Exactly why people get into such things is not easy to pin down, but it is not likely a matter of correct information not being available - the decision is not a rational process based on available evidence. Once people do begin to identify strongly with a group, conformity with the group is more important than any rational thought. Cultists are not going to convert out of the group just by being presented with correct information. When people fall out of cults, it is usually some kind of emotional experience that causes an epiphany.
The Republican anti-vax movement may not die down until the Trump cult itself does. This may happen for reasons not connected with covid (or it may not happen at all).
The problem is, Republicans aren't that anti-vax. Why Fox News even cares represents a echo chamber they have. On the otherhand, parts of the Democratic coalition is very anti-vax in general. Which is driven by anti-business, environmental policy and race mongering(coloreds).
Education is what drives vaccination in the mainstream.
I'm really not interested in explaining why stupid people are stupid anymore. Why bother? Let them be. And steer clear of them. It's really all you can do now.
“You need to tell people: We’re going to get a lot of cases,” said Dale Fisher, a professor of medicine at the National University of Singapore who heads the National Infection Prevention and Control Committee of Singapore’s Health Ministry. “And that’s part of the plan — we have to let it go.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/world/asia/living-with-covid-coronavirus.html
I blame Waldorfia & the originally leftwing rejection of government scholastic indoctrination of the military-industrial complex, for allowing Antivaxxxia to take root, with in later years the hardright of charter & choice schools supporters fertilizing the Waldorf Word Salad of Vaccine Autism with Q Drops.
The same thing happens in other hot button fields, like pediatric gender medicine. The research finds a 3-9 point increase in a 100 point mental health scale. The abstract claims "significant improvement" and then journalists referencing the paper call things "life-saving."
It's important to always check out the references. They don't necessarily say what the write implies they say.