Virus Users Infect Mindless Masses for the Greater Good

Experiment on YouTube reveals potential to 'inoculate' millions of users against misinformation

Aug 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-youtube-reveals-potential-inoculate-millions.html

Inoculation Science Project - by giving people a "micro-dose" of misinformation in advance helps prevent falling for it in future; social psychologist's call it "inoculation theory."

The videos introduce concepts from the "misinformation playbook". "The inoculation effect was consistent across liberals and conservatives. It worked for people with different levels of education, and different personality types. This is the basis of a general inoculation against misinformation."

"We've shown that video ads as a delivery method of prebunking messages can be used to reach millions of people, potentially before harmful narratives take hold," Goldberg said.

These were the misinformation techniques innoculated against:

Emotional language - Evaluate this sentence: "Baby formula linked to outbreak of new terrifying disease among helpless infants — parents despair." Users were asked to choose whether the sentence contained: a command; emotional language; false dichotomy; none of these.

False dichotomies - Evaluate this sentence: "We either need to improve our education system or deal with crime on the streets." Users were asked to choose whether the sentence contained: a command; fearmongering; false dichotomy; none of these.

Incoherence - Archimedian photon decouplers are encrypting air molecules in low earth orbit to hide voter registration logs of artificial citizens. (Just kidding, this might actually be true, just made that up.)

Image credit: Midwave Infrared image of powered circuit board taken with a FLIR X8501 camera and colored with a custom color palette called Triple Rainbow by Austin Richards, 2020 [link]

Post Script:

Oh boy imagine the Zuckerberg Foundation paying for that:

Added Roozenbeek: "If anyone wants to pay for a YouTube campaign that measurably reduces susceptibility to misinformation across millions of users, they can do so, and at a miniscule cost per view."

via University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and Google's open societry threats team Jigsaw: Jon Roozenbeek, Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo6254.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abo6254

All inoculation videos: https://inoculation.science/

Pandemimimetics

Tracking Facebook connections between parent groups and vaccine misinfo

Jan 2022, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/tracking-facebook-connections-between-parent-groups-and-vaccine-misinfo/

A recent analysis of the network of vaccine misinformation finds that most of the worst misinformation sources are probably too small to stand out as being in need of moderation. The analysis also shows that the pandemic has brought mainstream parenting groups noticeably closer to groups devoted to conspiracy theories.

These researchers are special, because they were already doing vaccine misinformation network analysis before the pandemic. 

They use the most basic of network analysis tools, ForceAtlas2, to look at how groups connect to each other via likes of each other's group-page. Groups were also categorized as pro- or anti-vaccine, or neutral.

Here's some things that were true both before and after the pandemic started:

• Pro-vaccine groups are double the anti-vaccine groups
• Pro-vaccine groups are strongly connected to each other, but less connected to neutral groups
• Anti-vaccine groups are also strongly connected to each other, but also more connected to neutral groups

But here's what happened during the pandemic:

• Anti-vaccine groups became more closely connected with alternative medicine in general (think reiki, homeopathy, and circadian rhythms...just kidding, circadian rhythms used to be conspiracy theory, but now less so)
• Alternative medicine is strongly connected to other conspiracy theories, like 5G or Fluoride in your Water
• Alternative medicine is also strongly connected to parent groups
• Anti-GMO is the most "in-between" the whole network, bringing together all the different groups into one massive supercluster of memetic evolutionary pressure.

So we have Alternative Medicine at the nexus of the pandemic-misinformation-network connecting parents to anti-vaccination groups. 

The rest of the article is about how Facebook failed to moderate misinformation on their network, and how, and what they can do better, but we're not really interested in that are we.

via The Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University: N. J. Restrepo, L. Illari, R. Leahy, R. F. Sear, Y. Lupu and N. F. Johnson, "How Social Media Machinery Pulled Mainstream Parenting Communities Closer to Extremes and Their Misinformation During Covid-19," in IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 2330-2344, 2022, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3138982.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9663381

Post Script:

New technique, effective in mice, could help advance the use of probiotics

Oct 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-technique-effective-mice-advance-probiotics.html

It sure looks like probiotics are good for us. The problems is they get destroyed by our own stomach acid.  So scientists designed a special protective envelope that helps the probiotics stay around long enough to do their thing in our digestive track. 

Would it be funny if eventually they eventually design it to be just like regular food?

via University of Wisconsin-Madison: Jun Liu et al, Biomaterials coating for on-demand bacteria delivery: Selective release, adhesion, and detachment, Nano Today (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.nantod.2021.101291

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nantod.2021.101291

Here's Another One:

After two hours, sunscreen that includes zinc oxide loses effectiveness, becomes toxic

Oct 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-hours-sunscreen-zinc-oxide-effectiveness.html

The older you get, the more you realize that almost any product which claims to have health benefits almost never does, and is actually causing as much problems as it tries to solve. I don't really blame anyone, because the human body is too complicated, and we'll never fully understand it. In this case, they added zinc because it's supposed to be better at blocking sun, which it does, until it doesn't, and then it actually facilitates reactions that make the rest of the ingredients toxic. Sunscreen is a market worth $24 billion.

Cheat sheet:

Sunscreen - wear clothes, they're modern

Probiotics - eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables

Electronic Air Cleaners - ventilate with filtered air

via Oregon State University: Aurora L. Ginzburg et al, Zinc oxide-induced changes to sunscreen ingredient efficacy and toxicity under UV irradiation, Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1007/s43630-021-00101-2

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s43630-021-00101-2