Good people fake news as well

Just recently, a host of good people with good intentions believed, propagated and even made-up, news. Their determination to believe that standard vaping caused the hospitalisations of scores of people in the US, prevented the real facts emerging for more than two months.

Vaping was the most obvious common factor among an worrying rash of hospitalisations in the US a few months back of people with a mysterious lung failure. It occurred against the backdrop of establishment activism against a rise in young people vaping, fueled further by President Trump. Media, commentators, and sadly, authorities, jumped onto the issue, warning people to stop vaping immediately.

Unfortunately, such was the force of this establishment peer pressure, the investigating health and police agencies were slow to undermine this "precautionary" advice by trusting in the facts they had to hand, or even trusting in basic logic.

What the authorities would have quietly figured in the first week was classic logic; that countries with similar or higher rates of vaping for at least a couple of years, had never seen this lung illness. Therefore the issue was not about vaping per se, but something related to the geography; like a source of fluid or a trend of usage behavior among users.

They had evidence in the first week that pointed to the local cause; at least a third of the patients admitted to using the devices to vape a cannabis fluid. Given the legal and social status of cannabis, it was possible the other patients had not accurately reported their behaviour.

This first-week calculation is now proven. The authorities have, two months later, felt confident enough against the anti-vaping hysteria to confirm that it wasn't standard vaping at all. All the patients had used street-bought or self-made fluid mixtures that combined cannabis with a vitamin e oil. As it happens, the danger of inhaling vitamin e oil is well known among the vaping sector; researchers, companies and enthusiasts. So it, along with other possible contaminants, are not used.

The establishment's pre-existing anti-vaping attitude prevented accurate and fair discussion of the issue. The truth had to wait until it was incontrovertible, and the emotional aspects of the panic had subsided.

A complicating factor was the tendency for people to believe "victims" in stories. Positing the cannabis hypotheses required infering the patients lied - which few people were brave enough to do. But it turned out that the patients had indeed lied. Check here for a fact check of the true story that emerged about every patient.

The establishment's response had the hallmarks of 'mob justice'; it created a "baddie" out of standard vaping some time ago. When the lung issue hit, it was primed to blame vaping, and to present patients as the 'good guys'.

We like good vs bad stories so much that we've now even created a story that 'bad' news, like 'fake news' comes from bad people.

But it doesn't. Most of the danger to truthful communication is posed by the ease with which good people with good intentions willingly suspend their own reasoning faculties.