Who is the Don Quichot here?

I am beginning to think it's me. Let me explain.

It's a pity that Twitter and Facebook fell into the trap of choosing user stats and top line revenue over sustainable quality, by allowing all sorts of nonsensical anti-scientific and false content to spread on their platforms - thus contributing to the misinformation wildfire. FB & Twitter have anyway already turned into the internet's sewage system years ago, turning the spread of political lies into a business model, so not a huge surprise.

You could argue that knowingly allowing for this misinformation content, combined with the known social media echo chamber effect, have let to possibly hundreds of thousands or even millions of people not believing there is a need to get vaccinated. The sources of the misinformation: reportedly only 12 people or entities. It's not hard to find the specific source of any of the deliberately misinformed posts (AKA "Lies'), but that was yesterday's newspaper.

What struck me the past weeks is that also LinkedIn is getting polluted with this horse manure. But wasn't this the platform of much-shared posts like "LET'S KEEP LINKEDIN PROFESSIONAL - DO YOU AGREE?? Here you can report "Inaccurate Information on Another Member's Profile " and "Recognize and Report Spam, Inappropriate, and Abusive Content ".

But it's indirect, it's not easy and it is again deliberately making it more difficult to fight misinformation than spreading it.

There is no "This is BS!" button. Oh, there is a reporting option - but once you are caught in the UI of this meager reporting tool, you cannot mark a post simply as 'misinformation'.

So instead of pointing at the antivaxers and covidiots as the Don Quichotes, it is turning me into someone fighting windmills - simply because I would like to, as the naive idiot that I am, correct the wrongs I see. Which is fundamental to a relationship based on trust.

"Righting wrongs", as Stephen R. Covey writes in The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything (2008), “is more than simply apologizing; it’s also making restitution. It’s making up and making whole. It’s taking action. It’s doing what you can to correct the mistake…and then a little more.”

So - am I fighting windmills here?

No of course not. As someone with the privilege of having been educated (thanks mom & dad) and the understanding of how science works and how to apply proper judgment (thanks - me), I should do the right thing. LinkedIn should encourage that, like the TSA does in US airports: "If you see something, say something".

If someone shares a video "where you see someone with a fever shed the vaccine after taking the shot", it is my duty to throw that garbage off of the platform. When that person engages in sharing more of this crap, I absolutely should and would report & block them.

There is some liar's logic in LinkedIn's statements about fighting misinformation. First of all, the last time they mentioned it in their own communication is November 10th, 2020. so it is apparently not THAT important. Hate speech is a more recent issue that LinkedIn is going to fight, and although equally a problem - in an Orwellian sense it's just more ...equal than misinformation.

Second - it is easy to spot how poorly messages get suppressed if you reverse-engineer how they arrived at your feed in the first place. The content gets over the first hurdle (filtering) by using evasive language, buy focusing on 'protests' and by using codewords like 'rise up', 'educate yourself', 'connect the dots' and so on. In case you have not seen that phenomenon before, it is language from poorly educated people that does not indicate they are going to study virology, it means they think googling antivax language is education.

Come on LinkedIn, you can easily spot these tricks: on Twitter and Facebook, since that is for sure the digital sewage canal where the sharers find both their sad content and its disguise.

There are also the usual suspects: many of the contributors to sharing misinformation have polluted the world with other conspiracy horse crap involving the WEF, evil Bill Gates, poor spelling, lots of exclamation marks, insane claims, magic potions curing everything. Your algorithm may not have shown me those posts (thank you), but a look-up of recent activity definitely reveals the pattern.

Yep - a windmill identified - stab it to death - block & report!

What can we do as individuals? Be all like Don Quichote?

It's a YES for me. If we massively complain, block and report, something must change. If you have a suggestion how to hurt LinkedIn in their wallet to force better policing - let me know in the comments.