Russian trolls pushed divisive content over vaccines, researchers say

I wonder if the Russians started or amplified the myth that polio vaccine was part of a plot to make Muslim women sterile? Clerics were involved in spreading the rumor but I wonder who started it and who all benefitted?

https://notestowomen.wordpress.com/tag/polio-vaccination/

The Cold War never ended. We just stopped fighting so the Russians could catch back up. They're winning now.

Great.

They're not just trying to steal our government, they're trying to kill our children.

Jenny McCarthy is a Russian troll? A lot of things seem to be coming together.

THere's a nightmare scenario here, if anyone writes thrillers. Russia convinces a large portion of the US population that vaccines are deadly. Then they unleash a weaponized smallpox virus.

I always think of the anti-vaxxer screed as a very weird form of gnosticism. Certainly a good place to sew distrust and misinformation, and a gateway drug into Red Pill thinking.

regdog said:

Divide us politically, racially and socially, then allegedly install an asset in the Oval Office. The new wars aren't fought with bombs, but social media.

Click to expand...

It also divides the people from the government. Part of our success in the first cold war, I think, was that many people in the country (at least where I live in the Midwest) had trust that the government had the people's best interest at heart. If that meant they did some harsh things, well it was for the greater good. That trust has completely eroded so now most of us only see the government operating in their own self interest and that of their cronies and big donators. So long as we question the motives of our own government they will not enjoy the support that would be necessary to win a cold war/propaganda style conflict. I am in no way suggesting that blind nationalism is something we should return to, it's just something that seems to go hand in hand with the vaccination "debate".

Not sure how relevant it is but Russian bots and trolls amplified existing anti-vaxxer beliefs. I've been involved with countering the anti-vaxxer movement for more than 30 years. It's amazing how a few key events can explode into worldwide movements.

Andrew Wakefield in an effort to market his own MMR vaccine published false data about the connection between MMR and autism.

Desperate parents want answers and solutions to their child's autism. When the data demonstrated no connection between MMR and autism, they latched on to other vaccine related causes. The next recipient of false blame was thimerosal, a preservative in multi-dose vials of many vaccines and other drugs. When thimerosal was removed from almost all kids' vaccines, the rate of autism went up in the US, not down. Then 'too many vaccines at once' became the theory du jour.

There's no evidence multiple vaccines at one time is harmful either and in the meantime methods of diagnosing autism earlier and earlier resulted in the discovery it was present at birth.

Then there was the theory a single person came up with that HIV was created and spread by culturing oral polio vaccine in monkey cells in the 1950s (Edward Hooper's Theory from "The River"). He's still pushing the book and the theory to this day despite the fact genetic research has traced the origin of HIV and its jump to humans.


The point of all this is that the Russians have no trouble finding groups of people with these conspiracy theories to then amplify. It's a shame because it's harmful not just to the people refusing to get vaccinated but it also promotes doubt of valid scientific evidence. Scientists become synonymous with the government even though lots of groups fund scientific research, not all of which are governments or corporations and not all government and corporate funded research is corrupt. Of course it may take decades after 45 to be able to say that again.

There's a consistent deeper thread to anti-vaxxer beliefs (as typified by people like Rima Laibow) that goes beyond pseudo-science into believing it's a sinister form of reality control. I know one of her talking points is that vaccination is about suppressing the pineal gland so that people (sheeple, in the parlance of our times) become less independent and more susceptible to control by a nameless and eldritch cabal. This kind of thinking is very useful for getting someone to forego logic and instead live according to a form of magical thinking and self-mythologizing, while herding them right into a reactionary and paranoid mindset. My pet theory on what happened with many of the Obama-to-Trump voters.

tl;dr- Russia is smart.

A lot of Trump voters were and most still are magical thinkers when it comes to Trump. He's a magic man, he can fix any and everything if we just trust him.

No doubt the Russians behind the bot and troll campaign knew just how to manipulate that kind of thinking.

Conspiracy theories have been a part of American pop culture for a long time, but they seem to be getting worse lately. The internet makes it easier to disseminate them, and the Russian troll farms are definitely playing a role. The anti vaxx folks I know vary in political outlook. Some are liberals coming at it from a "big pharma is trying to make money off human misery with the government in collusion" and "natural/holistic is always better, but there's this big plot to make us dependent on chemicals" perspective. Conservative or libertarian anti vaxxers see requirements for vaccines as a government intrusion in their lives, or perhaps they think it's a plot to make people weak or dependent, or it's a plot to squash religious freedom, or they simply mistrust science in general.

It's probably pretty easy for the trolls to manipulate both type of person.

I caught some of this talk on C-Span the other day. It's over an hour long, but the speaker raises some interesting points (and some questions too). I recommend it for anyone who wants to learn more about the history of conspiracy theories in the US.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?448220-1/conspiracy-culture-american-history