Should Web Sites Remove Misleading Health Information?

The breakthrough occurred during the coronavirus panic, while so many adults who had been using the Internet from work or school were offline. The multitudes of polls and surveys on this subject finally told some people what they wanted to hear: a Yahoo News survey found a sample of Web users who wanted web sites to protect them from “misleading information” about health matters.

Interesting. Wonder why I didn’t get that survey? Maybe because the subjects were set up to respond as they did by watching a movie, which my computer wouldn’t have played, that pretended to “document” blatantly false, upsetting “information” about COVID-19 having been deliberately bioengineered.

No points for guessing that the survey was sponsored by some corporation whose executives hoped the survey could be used to suppress accurate information by association with the misleading kind. It is in fact misleading to state that “Vaccines cause autism,” so Merck and other pharmaceutical companies’ official are no doubt drooling with the hope of persuading web sites to suppress more accurate information like “Individual reactions to vaccines can include fevers high enough to do permanent brain damage, which may produce or aggravate autism.”

It’s hairsplitting, but surely everyone sees the difference? Masses of people who are not autistic have had vaccines, so obviously vaccines don’t always cause autism. On the other hand hundreds of children who seemed normal before having certain vaccines have seemed autistic afterward, so, equally obviously, vaccines had something to do with their autism. The simple physical process by which some vaccine reactions produce or aggravate autism has been accepted by responsible pediatricians for more then sixty years. It’s not news. In fact, denying that a measles vaccination may make all the difference in whether a given child will become or seem autistic would be misleading information.

How do people recognize "fake news"? Well, on a five-minute timed test, they don't--and this came as a shock to some people. 

During the Trump Administration a hurricane left many people without electricity or drinking water in Puerto Rico. This web site was one of several that posted nags like our little ditty, "Our territories we'll protect, we said, come flood, come fire. If we don't stand by Puerto Rico, then we are a liar. A liar, a liar, we'll be a big fat LIIIIar..." Naomi Parker, whose blog is about knitting patterns, posted more political comments on Twitter and was also vocal about our obligations to Puerto Rico. So some Tweep of hers teased her and her other Tweeps with a bit of fake news. Trump had invited Puerto Rican hurricane victims to stay in Florida, but he was going to seize their passports and make them pay to get them back. 

Instantly NP and I posted comments like "How tacky can you get?" 

Then, because this was a qiestion of human rights and not merely budgeting, I asked first: "They have passports? People on that income level usually don't have passports. Why would they need passports anyway--they are U.S. citizens. They can visit any State for as long as they want and go back to their own Territory when they want."

And then we recognized that the news item was fake news. "Gotcha!" the joker scored off, by now, a couple dozen of NP's Tweeps who'd posted things like "How tacky can you get?" There has always been some fake news out there. Much of it slips past people because they don't really care. When people care whether a news story is true or not, they may not recognize fake news on sight but they can and do recognize it by following up on it. 

I say large multi-user web sites should continue to assume no responsibility for whatever facts, opinions, or outright lies people choose to post. I say people who read the words, if not people who believe whatever they see in a movie, are capable of remembering that anybody can post anything on Twitter, including typographical errors like omitting negative particles. That is, it’s possible for people to intend to tweet “It’s not raining outside” and actually post “It’s raining outside.” So if you see outright lies, e.g. “Glyphosate is safe” or “Measles is a deadly disease from which measles vaccines, which are harmless, keep us safe” or “The temperature in Virginia was 69 degrees Celsius at the time of writing,” on Twitter you check the facts elsewhere. You know that few people would survive if the temperature were 69 degrees Celsius so you automatically think “The person meant 69 degrees Fahrenheit.” About other things people say out loud or post on forum sites as if they were facts, you might need more work to reach a less positive conclusion.

Measles is a mostly trivial disease that can cause complications, including high fevers, brain or nerve damage most often associated with blindness, and death, in a minority of vulnerable individuals. Measles vaccines are a mostly non-fatal cure that can cause complications, including high fevers, brain or nerve damage most often associated with conditions that resemble autism, and death, in a minority of vulnerable individuals. Measles is a virus, which means vaccines contain live virus and are extremely susceptible to contamination. It also means the virus can mutate, so measles vaccines do not necessarily guarantee lifelong immunity to measles; people who’ve had either measles or the vaccine don’t “come down” with the disease but they can have unmistakable symptoms of it, twenty or thirty years later. The facts about measles and vaccines generally may not be as prejudicial to Merck as the facts about certain specific batches of Merck vaccines have been, but the facts are not “product-supportive.” After exposure to accurate facts on this topic many, if not most, people will not want the vaccine. And accurately reported facts will dramatically reduce sales of flu vaccine and other vaccines against minor diseases, too.

About health matters, the corporations will frantically admit when confronted with the product-unfriendly facts, there are, um, er, a lot more opinions than facts. This is true. For example, “[Cows’] milk is the perfect food [for humans]” definitely qualifies as misleading information, but what about “Cows’ milk has some place in a healthy diet for humans”? The majority of humans, worldwide, lose lactose tolerance at least by the age of fifteen! “Cheese is more digestible than milk, so restaurants should decorate everything with cheese”? Demonstrably false for some people, like me, who can still drink a glass of milk and keep it down, but cannot eat a slice of cheese and keep it down. (That cheese smells like vomit is an officially confirmed fact. That the vomit-like odor of cheese is disgusting and should be confined to a separate, fully enclosed room in restaurants that do continue to serve cheese is my opinion.) “Some humans do absorb some nutrition from milk, even as adults, so milk should still be sold as a food product” is less misleading, but it’s still an opinion. I happen to like ice cream but, if web sites are held responsible for any harm done to anyone by potentially misleading information about other people’s opinions, Twitter would have had to censor my encouragement to Ben & Jerry’s to keep their considerable weight behind the cause of making ice cream glyphosate-free again...because some people really do not need the suggestion that ice cream is food. For me ice cream is food; for many people it's toxic waste.

What about gluten? I saw this prompt on a survivalist site. What is gluten and should you be concerned about it when stocking your emergency supply of food? Several plant proteins are described as glutens, and in fact a few people may be unable to digest the others too, but wheat gluten intolerance is the kind that’s a problem for a large number of people. As many as one out of four or five people of Celtic descent may have some difficulty digesting wheat gluten but, during periods of history when wheat had not been treated with certain chemicals, serious health problems caused by this genetic trait were found in about one of every ten thousand people in Ireland, one in a hundred thousand in other parts of Western Europe, with no known incidence in non-Celtic populations. (The word “celiac,” the name for these people and their gene, is not related to the word “Celtic.”) As recently as 2008 it was possible to say that, although the gluten-free plates offered in some institutions tended to contain better and fresher food than the stale bread-based alternatives, for most people wheat gluten was a valuable source of protein and nutrients. Vegetarians actually throve on high-gluten bread! Then in 2009 glyphosate, which had previously been used only as a pesticide, went generic and manufacturers encouraged farmers to spray it directly onto grains, nuts, fruits and vegetables as a ripening agent to allow them to harvest more crops at one time. Masses of people became ill, didn’t get accurate information or helpful treatment, and found that adopting a gluten-free diet helped—somewhat—for a while—because avoiding gluten reduced the amount of glyphosate in their food. People have died from the unacknowledged effects of the glyphosate reactions they were having, some of which resembled celiacs’ gluten reactions, some of which did not. When stocking your emergency supply of food, if you’re not a celiac you should not have to worry about wheat gluten, which ought by rights to be a safe healthy food to store. Unfortunately the glyphosate that’s been added to the existing supply of wheat in the United States has killed many non-celiacs already and will probably kill more. Survivalists, very unfortunately, currently need to avoid stockpiling wheat. In fact almost any commercial plant-based food grown in the United States, including overpriced "organic" food, contains enough glyphosate to make you sick. And the corporate weasels have worked to prevent farmers from telling you if any of their crops do happen to be safe to eat. Many "gluten-free" foods trigger celiac reactions because they're not glyphosate-free...and the industry has attacked, and sabotaged, food processors who've tried to offer products that were glyphosate/GMO-free. 

Should web sites remove the misleading suggestion that wheat, other grains, nuts, vegetables, fruit, or meat commercially grown in the United States are safe for humans to eat? Or touch? In many cases, due to the extreme level of glyphosate contamination the industry is fighting so hard to maintain, that’s not true. If web sites are held to account for allowing people to post “misleading health information,” anyone who tries a yummy vegan recipe somebody posted on Tumblr and develops massive bleeding ulcers from ingesting glyphosate-poisoned tomatoes and glyphosate-poisoned spinach will be able to sue Tumblr. Is this really the way we want American society to be?

We need to put coronairus behind us and get back to work on the glyphosate contamination issue. We need to accept the fact that, during the coronavirus panic, even the most authoritative sources spouted “misleading information” about the dreaded virus, and because they were really reporting hasty opinions based on incomplete information about something new, “misleading” was the only kind of information about coronavirus that existed.

The value of the Internet is that it allows rapid transfer of information. Whenever news is breaking, some of that information is certain to be incomplete and, therefore, misleading. That is the nature of early information.

In order for the Internet—or daily newspapers—to be useful, people need to be reminded that some of the information they convey is going to be misleading. There will always be items like “Four people died in the fire” reports that have to be followed by next week’s “No, actually seven, counting the three who were taken to hospitals but not revived,” or “Candidate A won a close race in the Eastern States” followed by “But then Candidate B’s party rallied the vote and swept the polls in the West, so B won the popular vote.” On interactive sites there will also be items like “John Doe has an apartment for rent—oh no he doesn’t, his grandfather just moved into it,” and “Jack and Jill’s wedding will take placenext Sunday—or no, wait, it won’t take place at all, now that Jill got a good long look at Jack’s porn collection,” or “Suzy Q’s boutique has X on sale...erm, make that ‘had’.” And there will also be “Celebrity X just collapsed...was it a heart attack, an overdose? No, doctors now say it looked more like diabetes. No, wait, it’s not diabetes, it’s...” and similar “misleading health information” whenever any piece of health news, private or public, trivial or substantial, is either new, or bitterly resisted by unethical profit-oriented corporations.

The best way to reduce the harm done by misleading information is to allow prompt correction. Therefore web sites need to avoid clogging the flow of information by any kind of censorship. Instead they should rely on disclaimers, like “Individual users are responsible for the information they post here.”

--At least, that is what reason has been telling web site owners from the beginning of the Internet. However, web site owners are fallible mortals, and as a Twitter Insider I had opportunities to see firsthand how the marketing department wheedled, “Oh please, can’t we offer big corporate sponsors the brand-friendly benefits of corporate censorship, just like all those TV news channels that Real Twits dislike, distrust, and avoid for that reason? Yes, of course Twitter will lose all redeeming social value if it becomes the voice of the big corporations, another form of television, and Real Twits will detest and abandon Twitter if it does...but can’t we destroy Twitter, grab the money and run? Please please pleeeeasse?” 

I don’t really expect web site owners to grow enough of a spine to tell the marketing departments that, if that’s what it takes to make their web sites profitable, they might as well just shut down the web sites while their individual names still have some credibility, or while the basically unsustainable Internet retains enough users to make it usable for any purpose. I expect the Internet to self-destruct, actually; the way things are going now, I give it three years.

But, if any web sites are going to be around five years from now, I think they’ll be the ones that rely on disclaimers rather than censorship to avoid the horror of being held responsible for misleading information. 

As for the sites, like Elon Musk's X.com, that agree to censor content that hurts sales of sponsors' products--i.e. whistleblowing on vaccines that are more likely to kill previously healthy people than COVID was, or glyphosate, or cigarettes...I think we all know what decent people do about them.