
We Must Prepare for the Next Pandemic - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/opinion/pandemic-fake-news.html
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rubbingalcohol
This is the one time I vehemently disagree with Schneier. Creating mass
censorship infrastructure to automatically ban stuff that isn't "truthy" can
easily be abused for totalitarian ends. He's right that it would be easier to
set up such infrastructure if you have an apolitical pretext, but that doesn't
make it any less dangerous.

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Pmop
I have a personal belief that if something can be gamed for power, it'll be
gamed for power. It's not a possibility, it's just a matter of time. No-go for
mass censorship devices.

~~~
fuzz4lyfe
Democracy selects for people who are the best at playing the election game is
it any surprise they are good at other types of games as well?

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WA
Well, on the other hand: if there was a Pandemic, Google and Facebook are
trusted enough to put some kind of official info out there that could help to
mitigate the problem. I’m by no means a Google or FB fan, but if they showed a
big banner on their websites what to do to deal with the Pandemic, many people
would probably consider it legit.

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LarryDarrell
In the U.S. we have a medical system where people avoid going to the doctor
for fear of cost. I feel like this is not the best system to have in a
pandemic or epidemic situation.

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nonwifehaver3
When I saw the title, I was expecting an article about how we need to: educate
citizens ahead of time about the different ways that disease can spread
ensuring they don't fall prey to misinformation, fund more research for
monitoring and mitigation, invest in stuff like "you need to let your
employees work from home if there's a pandemic if possible, you need to
emphasize to healthcare and transportation workers that in an emergency they
are going to be needed the way that soldiers are needed in wartime and pay
them extra".

But, it's just another demand for everyone to build a permanent apparatus to
censor every communication that doesn't come from a very official and accurate
source such as the publisher or the author's employer. This line of thinking
is basically saying that democracy is a failure -- that most people are a
bunch of easily deluded simpletons who have to be herded around for their own
good, and _they can 't even learn ahead of time_ what they might need to know
in a pandemic. Maybe that's part of the answer to a very important question
behind all this, which is "why are people losing trust in society's most basic
institutions, even when they're right?"

~~~
Someone
_”and they can 't even learn ahead of time what they might need to know in a
pandemic.”_

They can, but why would they? The power of society is that we work together.
You don’t need to know how to grow wheat, bake bread, or herd cows anymore,
either, but that doesn’t make us simpletons.

~~~
nonwifehaver3
I looked into some recent disease-related misinformation (re Zika) and
honestly it would be hard for many people to look at it and immediately say
_why_ it was wrong (it was extremely wrong). It wasn't like "putting Vaseline
under your nose stops you from getting the flu". So I don't think people can
really be prepared for everything ahead of time & there has to be some
authority.

I still think that the key problem is that people distrust health and
government institutions, not that they're allowed (for now) to post quackery
or misinformation. I don't really understand how one gets that way. There are
perceptions that public health institutions are politicized. Maybe they've
never been friends with a doctor or a health official. Maybe their trust has
been broken re health or even some other part of government. You can delete
someone's posts pretty easily, but you can't force someone to trust the CDC or
whoever. It needs to be built over time.

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nickthemagicman
We're not even acknowledging that climate change exists despite 99.999% of
scientists agreeing.

Hoping that we'll actually prepare for a pandemic seems remarkably long
sighted for such a short sighted species as ours.

~~~
justaguyhere
I used to think those doomsday preppers are crazy, not anymore.

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> Much of it will be well-intentioned but wrong — like the misinformation
spread by the anti-vaccination community today — but some of it may be
malicious.

Well, a lot of the misinformation about vaccines has clear financial motives:
it's spread by people selling "natural" remedies, homeopathic "vaccines" and
so on or making their living by writing books and speaking in talk shows etc.

So not at all well-intentioned, I'd say.

~~~
shrimp_emoji
A while ago, I searched around to find info about a recent glyphosate panic
surrounding the Impossible Burger. I kept finding multiple, obscure sites
(some nakedly involved in selling "natural health" products) with the same
copy-pasted article[0][1][2] but not much else. The article even gives itself
away to any sober reader; it's obnoxiously loaded, with a heading, "Impossible
Foods Resorts to Insults, Name-Calling to 'Defend' Their Fake Burger". Still,
it's cute to see disinfo in action.

No legitimate-seeming news source was saying much about the issue at the time,
and older sources were saying the glyphosate levels were within safe
limits[3].

[0]:
[https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/06/...](https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/06/04/impossible-
burger-glyphosate-residues.aspx)

[1]: [https://healthtipdaily.com/impossible-burger-attacks-moms-
fo...](https://healthtipdaily.com/impossible-burger-attacks-moms-for-
publishing-pesticide-results/)

[2]: [https://healthvox.net/2019/06/04/impossible-burger-
attacks-m...](https://healthvox.net/2019/06/04/impossible-burger-attacks-moms-
for-publishing-pesticide-results/)

[3]: [https://www.cnet.com/how-to/impossible-burger-everything-
you...](https://www.cnet.com/how-to/impossible-burger-everything-you-need-to-
know/)

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kylek
SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING.

~~~
SparkleBunny
At least Madagascar will make it out alive.

