Collected Item: “Fact Checkers”
Give your story a title.
Fact Checkers
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
Instagram post
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
This is an Instagram post by covid_antivax. This post is in criticism of social media removing posts deemed "misinformation" about COVID and the vaccine. The tags from this user, like #depopulation, suggest that the goal of COVID and the vaccines is to reduce the population size.
The censoring of information regarding the virus and the vaccine has been troublesome for myself. I do not think it is the right of social media to dictate what can and cannot be said, barring anything illegal, like death threats. I think it is a dangerous trajectory when these multinational companies start deciding what governing bodies and people should think. It brings into question people's actual rights to speech. People should have the right to voice their opinion on subjects like this. If people are prevented from speaking out as much on social media, they will get driven to more niche websites and forums to discuss things, which in turn help create more echo chambers. The great thing about free speech is the ability to bounce ideas off with other people and be given the opportunity to decide for myself what is right with more information available. Taking this away will make it harder to really test ideas and make them more refined. This is more my criticism of social media in general, but the talk on the virus and the vaccines has noticeably made it worse for any side to reconcile.
The censoring of information regarding the virus and the vaccine has been troublesome for myself. I do not think it is the right of social media to dictate what can and cannot be said, barring anything illegal, like death threats. I think it is a dangerous trajectory when these multinational companies start deciding what governing bodies and people should think. It brings into question people's actual rights to speech. People should have the right to voice their opinion on subjects like this. If people are prevented from speaking out as much on social media, they will get driven to more niche websites and forums to discuss things, which in turn help create more echo chambers. The great thing about free speech is the ability to bounce ideas off with other people and be given the opportunity to decide for myself what is right with more information available. Taking this away will make it harder to really test ideas and make them more refined. This is more my criticism of social media in general, but the talk on the virus and the vaccines has noticeably made it worse for any side to reconcile.
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
vaccine, vaccine skepticism, pandemic skepticism, opinion, free speech, social media, conspiracy theory, echo chamber, HST580, ASU
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
covid_antivax
Give this story a date.
2022-05-11