The Great Censorship BoomerangSuppressing negative information about a product doesn’t build trust—and much of the distrust surrounding the COVID vaccine can be traced directly back to pro-vaccine misinformation.
By Adam Mill
January 29, 2022
Juniper loves Milk Bone dog biscuits. Yet if you push one into her mouth, she will immediately spit it out until she has the opportunity to inspect the item being forced upon her. Understandably, Juniper assumes that I would not force feed her unless there was something wrong with the item.
This simple exchange with my dog reminds me of a little-noticed statistic now published by the CDC: 60 percent of Americans eligible for the booster have yet to obtain the third jab. In spite of the fact that all American adults are now eligible, 6 in 10 Americans who voluntarily took the vaccine now hesitate before accepting a third shot. While Americans initially rushed to obtain the booster at the rate of 1 million per day, that number has begun to drop sharply.
For many Americans, the booster promoters have, ironically, stoked skepticism through their heavy-handed mandates, shaming, and censorship. The outrage and propaganda directed at anything that might cast doubt on the vaccine or other pandemic mitigation measures has had exactly the opposite effect that the scolds intended.
To illustrate, imagine you had to buy the vaccine online only to find out that the vaccine producers censor all of the one and two star reviews. We all read the negative reviews to reassure ourselves before making a purchase. No product is perfect, but we gain more confidence in the good reviews after reading the bad reviews. But when platforms censor reviews, we assume those concerns must worry the people most knowledgeable about the product.
The kerfuffle over Joe Rogan provides an instructive example. A group of doctors published an open letter to Spotify to call for the deplatforming of the most successful podcast in the world. The doctors were careful to accuse Rogan of spreading “misinformation,” an Orwealian term that doesn’t exactly mean “untrue,” or “lying.” The censorship urged by these doctors isn’t limited to combatting incorrect statements by Rogan, but a total destruction of his ability to say anything (true or not) in the future.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/29/the-great-censorship-boomerang/
