![]() I've learned to program in three languages, including C++, and was surfing the Internet in the early 1990s.Īs a journalist, Professor Google is a constant companion (actually, these days I use the allegedly eco-friendly Ecosia as a search engine).īut, just as a yacht needs both a sail to propel her, and a keel to steady her, so we need a stabilising force in our everyday lives. In case you think I'm some kind of a Luddite, out to smash the computers - I'm not. “They are very selective about what they believe and don’t believe on social media,” Andrew Brewerton, principal and chief executive of Plymouth College of Art, says. Perhaps the young have more chance of using social media appropriately. “Bill Gates is promoting vaccines in order to kill 15% of the world’s population.” (That’s a real allegation, by the way – I didn’t make it up.) “I’m a Martian” (OK, you knew that already). You or I can post anything we like on Facebook. ![]() Social media have become so dangerous because they dominate the internet, which is where most of us do our research – and because they are unfiltered. Influx of visitors expected on roads into Devon and Cornwall.So if you believe the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory, you’re going to have to explain to me how South Korea escaped, but Iran didn’t. It hopes to implement a first version of the 5G network only next year. Iran has had 225,205 cases – 2,682 for every million people in the country – and 10,670 deaths Iran trails a long way behind on 5G. New flu with pandemic potential found in China by scientists.In South Korea, the rollout of 5G is widespread, with more than five million 5G subscribers. South Korea has had 12,757 cases of Covid-19 so far – a rate of 249 for every million people in the country – and 282 deaths. The task of proving any hypothesis false is usually difficult, but fortunately two countries have given us some useful evidence. The reason it’s dangerous is that it has led to a number of mobile mast attacks across the country during lockdown – and that endangers the lives of people who might need the help of the emergency services. If that last bogus idea were not so dangerous, it would be worth a laugh. Nothing has changed in principle, but where, once, a mob might number in the hundreds, now any tub-thumping firebrand can whip up a following of ten times that in minutes.Īs we head inexorably towards either or both a second Covid-19 spike and a vaccine, perhaps you’d consider getting your information from newspapers – where at least we try to get it right – rather than from social media which, frankly, doesn’t care either way.Ī new study has found that people who rely on social media for information about coronavirus are more likely to believe conspiracy theories and breach lockdown rules.Īmong those who believe there is no hard evidence that the virus even exists, 56% use Facebook as their key information source – almost three times the proportion of people who do not believe such a thing (20%).Ī Twitter meme - but not all ridiculed 'facts' turn out to be trueĪnd 8% think the symptoms that most of us blame on Covid-19 appear to be connected to 5G network radiation. There is a certain “Wisdom of Crowds”, as the writer James Surowiecki called his 2004 book – but it rarely exists on social media, where truth struggles with its boots while fake news skips round the planet. Sometimes, you can't even believe the evidence of your own eyes. In 2008 McDonald's paid 1,000 people to stand in line at a Japanese store to promote the release of the Quarter Pounder. The Illuminati panics of the early 19th century were still doing the rounds when I was a small boy 150 years later. ![]() None of us is immune.Ĭonspiracy theories abounded around the assassination of US President John Kennedy in 1963 and the supposed Roswell UFO. Ignorance and misinformation reign supreme, and probably always will. The pitchfork mob has been with us for as long as there were pitchforks. People just like them, their Facebook ‘friends’, apparently, thought coronavirus was a hoax, so out they went, waving their placards and shouting their slogans. Many of those who gathered to protest against the lockdown were, it’s said, motivated by what they had seen on social media. It’s the art of building a fake grassroots movement, and apparently it has been widespread in the United States during the pandemic. I LEARNED a new expression for an old tactic this week – “astroturfing”.
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