It is more powerful because it reaches more people - and furthermore it has exponential amplifiers (social networks) that encourage the most pathological kinds of it.
Pathological medical misinformation causing widespread damage certainly isn't a new phenomenon. Do you know about the lobotomy trend, where 40,000 Americans had their brains sliced apart for no good reason? (Have you seen the news clippings of deniers and snake oil ads for the Spanish Flu?)
Precisely, and this is genuinely scary. At the time, there was no sophisticated evolutionary environment that spreads "information" at lightning speed with a fitness function tuned for "engagement" and bad ideas still found ways to spread.
Nowadays a random tweet can (sometimes accidentally) mobilize a mob with pitchforks.
What I'm trying to say is that there was such an evolutionary environment. The 60s were full of deadly riots mobilized by some minor rumor - the Watts riot, for example, killed dozens of people in response to rumors of police misconduct in a drunk driving arrest. We just don't normally think about it this way, because when we look back at history the Watts riot is always interpreted as a facet of "race relations in the US, 1960-1970" rather than a standalone event.
Are you saying we had systems for spreading rummors that were just as efficient and sophisticated as today's, 40 years ago?
I'm not sure I have the right words to explain what kind of environment I mean. A platform such as twitter is a directed graph with billions of connections, all operating instantly. Tweeting is effortless, retweeting even more so. For many people this means sending something to thousands (sometimes millions) of others to see needs less than a couple of seconds of effort.
My claim is that the radical increase in efficiency and volume comes with radically new problems of scale.
I'm saying that it was easy to get a rumor seen by thousands of people if you wanted to (just tape a poster to a local utility pole), and the slightly lower startup costs in a social media world don't seem to be producing any radically new problems. This makes intuitive sense; any rumor exciting enough to provoke a real problem is gonna be exciting enough that people are willing to make flyers for it. There are certainly things I see on social media that I don't like, but none of them seem like they fundamentally couldn't have happened without social media.
Is that irony, though? Not that I downvoted the parent comment or anything, but inasmuch as downvoting is saying "I don't think your comment is of high quality", that's totally not inconsistent with free speech.
There's a difference between saying "I think XYZ is wrong" and saying "I don't think people should be able to say XYZ", and downvoting feels much more like the former.
Yeah, I'd prefer engagement instead. Thought on these things must be refined, and we should probably do it fast because the knee-jerk solution (censorship) is taking over really fast.
Read this thread, and then multiply this approximate scenario by a million: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1458881015917678594.html