It depends on which vaccine you talk about but efficacy ranges from effective to extremely effective against the viral strains they were designed to fight. Polio was nearly eradicated until anti-vax propaganda started being spread.
Even in the worst case like COVID for example where you have a rapidly evolving virus the multiple permutations of the vaccine has shown that in over a billion administered shots it was effective at reducing all negative outcomes of covid ranging from spread to symptoms to death within 100 mutations of the original strain.
I don't have tabs on what every public official says but this circles right around to my prior point. On the whole the medical community has been pretty clear with the efficacy of vaccines. If there are a few instances where a public official misspoke, that would be understandable given that we are all human. That doesn't change the bigger picture. This reminds of those that were attacking the legitimacy of medical professionals because said accusers conflated statements early on in the COVID pandemic about not purchasing masks as if to mean that masks weren't effective. In reality masks are effective against COVID, those early statements were made to allow those in the medical field who need masks most to be able to obtain them.
Yes, misinformation is false information without the knowledge that it is incorrect. It's an exact match to the description Disinformation is spreading information knowing it is incorrect. Typically misinformation starts from a source spreading disinformation.
The internet enables the spread of this kind of information on a massive scale. Everyone's racist uncle does not need to be heard by billions of people, that is not a guaranteed right. Instead the internet enables people like this as controversial content is often promoted on most platforms to drive profits. The added anonymity also emboldens people to say things they would not say in real life. Rules makes honest people they say, even a good man might rob a bank with the vault door left open and no one there.
No one said it would be an insta-ban for a single instance of spreading misinformation. It would have to be particularly harmful for that to be the case.
You can have an effective multi-prong system in place to ensure free speech is protected as well as everyone else's rights.
One prong of that system might be limiting the scope of who sees a person's posts. If a person repeatedly trolls, spreads misinformation, or makes low effort posts and refuses to correct their behavior after being notified of their actions their comments can be limited to only being seen by their friends and those in similar groups and cannot be shared beyond the initial post.
IMO a lot of people should not be posting the entire world because the vast majority of people do not have anything of value to say. There needs to be a trust system in place so that people have to earn the right to post to broader and broader audiences. At a certain broadcast size (scope of the number of people that can see a post) individuals should be requires to provide ID and other documents, otherwise their posts will be limited in the number of people that can see or share them.
As to who decides what is true and what is false, that would preferably be done by a neutral 3rd party. That said the above given systems and other systems can be used to greatly mitigate the need for this. In addition, I do not believe there should be any "news" on social media as they avoid many regulations that regular news outlets have to go through. These are just systems that I'm thinking of on the spot, surely multi-billion dollar companies can create these systems. They don't because profits are priority.
Unfortunately ignore only works when you are in the forum. If you are just browsing the news article though you still see ignored users.
I want to thank you again for your thoughtful reply. Though we may not agree about everything, I genuinely and sincerely respect and appreciate that you and I can have civil discourse. I can tell you took time to clearly express yourself, and I won't take that for granted.
I'm going to list my counter points in the order which you wrote yours.
This is one of my heroes, Jonas Salk. I am not anti-vaxx. When I mentioned questionable vaccine efficacy, I was indeedd talking about the covid vaccine. The efficacy of the covid vaccine has had a very controversial effect, especially when it comes to disease prevention, communicability, and death. We are still too deep in the forest to distinguish the trees from it, that is- we are not far enough away from the pandemic to have perspective on the data as a whole. People who say the vaccine doesn't work or does work, I think is extreme.
"I don't have tabs on what every public official says but this circles right around to my prior point. On the whole the medical community has been pretty clear with the efficacy of vaccines. If there are a few instances where a public official misspoke, that would be understandable given that we are all human."
Here is where I disagree with you the most. The tabs on public officials I was mentioning was our commander in chief, head of the CDC, Faucci, and corporate media. Take these two examples
here and
here. Those are the highest ranking people in society. They don't mis-speak continuously, they double down. They continuously spoke the "not-truth", and I think there is a word for "not-the-truth".
As for masks, you and I both agree that masks do work to prevent particulate from being spread so rapidly. A good distinction is that N-95 have the highest percentage of efficacy for normal consumer masks. I also agree about the botched misinformation that those leaders said about masks causing mass confusion toward the efficacy. However, you are comparing apples and oranges when talking about mask efficacy and experimental vaccines shown not to work as described like in the links above.
"Yes, misinformation is false information without the knowledge that it is incorrect."
In principle your definition is 100% correct, however in the popular colloquial-vernacular, disseminating misinformation is something associated with having an agenda whilst possibly simutanesouly inciting an agenda that requires deception and obfuscation. Which I would would not define as being wrong or ignorant. Just as I tried to more precisely define the bad actors you were referring to before, instead of lumping them into one category, being wrong for example Terminator starred Selvestor Stalone not Arnold Schwarzenegger or being ignorant: "my ethnicity/race/religion is superior to X ethnicity". These examples are of being incorrect and ignorant, here is an example of misinformation: "The cornoa-virus vaccine makes women infertile and turns your future babies into reptiles" or "sale Apple stock NOW! ITS GOING DOWN". This is what misinformation is, this is my disntction- I hope I'm not "disseminating misinformation"-- aka being wrong about something.
Now to switch gears and talk about the freedom of expression: " Everyone's racist uncle does not need to be heard by billions of people, that is not a guaranteed right." The united states constitution and supreme court have a long precedent of disagreement with you. I asked before if you knew who Ira Glasser was. He was a Jewish man from holocaust surviving family memembers who was the head of the ACLU and faught for the rights of Neo-Nazi's right to freely express themselves in a Jewish town, doing blatantly offensive and terrible a antisemitic parade. He wasn't advocating for them or their message, but for the freedom of speech and expression that America has been so famous for to this day. We still have the most freedom of expression when compared to other western countries, however more and more citizens want to have a sanitized version of reality where the people who have as you put it "controversial" opinions are silenced from discourse. Living in authoritarian countries has made me cherish our freedoms even more.
Just like browsing the web, talking with people in real life, or watching TV- if you don't like something or someone, you can just not give that thing your attention or time. To excommunicate someone who doesn't follow what you or I think or "know" to be true or accurate is a slippery slope. An example of this is to your point "an independent 3rd party". Tik-Tok and other big-tech like facebook claim to be moderated by third party neutral entities. However like we saw with Matt Taibbi and the twitter files, sometimes that independent third party is the actual government in power and manipulating the control of information, like the Hunter Biden laptop story. Who should be banned for that? The president? The apparatus that tried to manipulate and control the "controversial" information? Who gets to decide what is controversial- the independent third party like the FBI or DNC/GOP? Slippery slope.
We can never depend on neutral third parties to tell us what is or isn't real, like you said, people are human, they make mistakes. An important part of living and participating in a democratic society is being an informed citizen, if you remove the responsibility from yourself to determine what is and isn't real then reduces your capacity to think critically about issues. An example of this is the WMDs from the Iraq war or the gulf of Tonkin. The people in the highest authority and leaders with the most power lied to us while looking directly in our eyes.
I'm not an anarchist, I agree with you that there should be rules. However those rules should respect the constitution fist and foremost as it is our foundation and moral compass for what is truly patriotic and American. The ex twitter CEO said that "we won't be bound by the first amendment". I don't think people realize who are angry about seeing a flat earther video- that this is the most important right to a free society- the ability to be wrong- just as it is our right to tell that person they are wrong and why. The struggle against misinformation and ignorance lies in what you and I are doing, disagreeing but taking the time to learn from each other.
Thank you for your responses man.
