Platform Peril
No, not THAT kind of Platform Peril.
One of the things I’ve thought about a lot lately is just how important it is to be mindful whenever you have an audience.
What I mean by this is the responsibility you have as someone with a platform to disseminate information responsibly. In the age of social media, the barrier to posting information that others might see as news is far lower than it used to be. You can simply go to your computer (or phone), type in a series of words on BlueSky, and congratulations - you’ve become a reporter!
This is one of the many ways in which the Internet has fundamentally altered the way we live our lives. Among other things, it’s driven local journalism to the brink of extinction. Maybe I’ll write more about that some other time.
Of course, as a certain superhero once told us, with great power comes great responsibility. That has hardly ever been more true than it is today, in an era when we face so many overlapping crises that the U.S. government is either not solving or actively working to exacerbate. And if you don’t believe me, just take this example:
Boston Globe political cartoon from 2017.
It’s no secret that systemic racism exists in America. Even after it was no longer legal to own black people as property, we had the Jim Crow era in which there were whites-only drinking fountains, schools, etc. And I also don’t need to tell you that even after segregation no longer carried the force of law behind it, it remains effectively in place in many U.S. cities. This doesn’t even take into account the endless police brutality we see in the United States that nobody ever bothers to do anything about other than kneel in kente cloth.
All of this came to a head when Trump became President the first time. In case you’ve forgotten (which would make you the average American voter) , there was a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. After the murder of a counter-protestor, Trump went to the podium and announced that there were very bad people in that group, “but you also had people who were very fine people, on both sides.”
The uproar was immense from the same “liberal” media who seem awfully silent now. They rightly pointed out that when the President of the United States speaks, people listen. It’s no surprise that hate crimes spiked under Trump’s first term, and they are already rising again now - just look at all those racist text messages sent in the days following his 2024 victory.
But just think about the power of Trump’s platform. I might be among his detractors, but the fact remains that when the President of the United States speaks, people listen. I’m old enough to remember he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a debate, and days later the FBI unveiled a plot to kidnap and probably kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Now, I’m going to do something surprising. I’m going to talk about irresponsible famous people who don’t live in the U.S. I know. Crazy, right?
A 2013 anti-vaccine rally in the UK, from The Independent. As an important disclaimer to remain in compliance with ethical standards: These people are incorrect, and the ideas they promote here are not only dangerously wrong, they’re just plain dangerous.
Those of my readers who are significantly older than me might remember that in 1998, a study was published in The Lancet, the most prestigious medical journal in the United Kingdom, “demonstrating” a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Again, to remain in compliance with my better judgment, this link does not exist.
The “doctor” behind it, Andrew Wakefield, was stripped of his medical license once this “study” was found to in fact be fraudulent. In a way, however, the damage was already done. Just look at who the US is going to have in charge of public health in Trump’s next administration. The harms of not vaccinating your child are very well-documented. We have seen the consequences in the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa, a particularly dangerous disease given that the measles virus can “reset” your immune system’s memory. But there are over eight billion people in the world, and if even a relatively small percentage are led to believe that vaccinating your child can cause them to develop autism, that’s still a lot of people.
More importantly, this doesn’t just harm public health, but also public trust in scientific institutions. As a reminder, The Lancet was previously the UK’s most trusted medical journal. It’s not just the conspiracy theorists who always shit on scientific advancements who might be swayed by such a fraudulent “study.”
Consider also the average person who doesn’t pay much attention to the scientific community, but trusts science as an institution because they have the evidence on their side. In the UK at least, this is far, far more people than those we might call anti-vaxxers. The Lancet published, and still does publish, many things that are demonstrably true. So when they publish such harmful disinformation, even if only once, this plants the seeds of doubt in some minds that maybe other scientific journals aren’t to be trusted as well. And if too many parents refuse to vaccinate their children, herd immunity will be jeopardized for the rest of us. If RFK Jr. is confirmed, we’re in deep trouble as a species.
In both of the cases I described above, the messengers probably didn’t care how much damage they would end up doing. Trump certainly doesn’t, and it speaks to the unique depravity of this country that we allowed him to return to power.
Just because some of our “leaders” aren’t mindful of the power of their platforms, however, doesn’t absolve small creators like myself of our obligation to tell the truth. After all, the reason I write this blog is because I want to provide a news outlet for the resistance to the incoming Trump regime. I’m as careful as I can be to always get the facts right, and I only wish that more well-known people were equally mindful.
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