Before the shooting, social media companies relaxed their protocols around misinformation.
In the weeks and months before the Aug. 8 shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, posts tying Covid vaccines to mental illness accrued millions of views online.
Previously more tightly moderated, some of the world’s largest social media platforms now operate with far fewer guardrails, allowing vaccine misinformation to flourish.
On X, for example, verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers openly claimed in recent weeks that Covid vaccines act like “chemical lobotomies,” which is false.
On Facebook, health influencers with broad reach alleged that Covid vaccines cause severe brain damage or other severe side effects such as cancer, despite no scientific basis for those claims.
And on TikTok, videos repeating the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism drew hundreds of thousands of views this year, spreading doubt to wide audiences.
I don’t get how people are still pushing this nonsense. Over 200 million people have taken the Covid vaccine inside the US alone. If it was that dangerous we’d see SOME kind of evidence of it by now.
Or, if you are part of the “wellness” cult, you can just make up that “evidence”.
I mean, hell, they do it for things like MMR and have been lying about this shit quite extensively since at least the 90s (the anti-intellectualism of the anti-vaccine movement goes back to the very beginning I realize). How many Americans have had that shot? Throw in scary terms like “spike protein” and it being new(ish) tech, and the propensity for outrageous bullshit in the black helicopter scene takes on new heights.