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Coronavirus conspiracy and false info

2020-02-28 19:01:37.776978+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

So yesterday I saw a post, forwarded around as a picture (which you can see here), that includes the phrase "The vaccine contained replicating, DIGITIZED (controllable) RNA which were activated by 60GHz mm 5G waves that were just turned on in Wuhan". After wondering WTF units a "Hz mm" could possibly be measuring (I mean, frequency is cycles/time, so is this "cycles / (time * distance)" or "(cycles / time) * distance"?), I tried Googling subportions of the phrase, and found the spread from an apparently now disabled, or name changed, Instagram account, to various WordPress sites, to a Reddit subgroup...

And today I'm seeing that Facebook is fact-checking The Onion:

The Onion: WWE Staff Forced To Shoot Aggressive Wrestler After Child Climbs Into Steel Cage

A few days ago another FB friend posted a ludicrous article claiming CBS47 Investigation: Gov. Newsom redirects gas tax money to fund railway systems, not highways. Which is a "uh, yeah, right, CalTrans budget is $17B, California gas tax revenues are $6.5B, how would that work?" moment (Not to mention that given the huge subsidies of the automobile, we should be viewing state spending as on mobility, but that's a deeper nuance).

Which, I guess, is the long way of saying "holy shit, the Internet is revealing that there's apparently a huge amount of energy being put into spreading misinformation, and our education system is apparently really bad at teaching basic critical thinking.

And Facebook is really bad at figuring out what needs to be tagged as "false information".

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