Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Thursday 12th Dec is Election day in the UK. Is it a nice clean election with no evidence of any manipulation at all? Er … no. Here are a few quick examples. The Punch that was not a Punch The BBC Sockpuppets are being played as usual. For example we had the “credible” report yesterday … Read more
One part of the Facebook “solution” is to flag Fake News as Fake. This is how they describe it … Better identifying false news through our community and third-party fact-checking organizations so that we can limit its spread, which, in turn, makes it uneconomical. This leads to an interesting question. If you permit people to … Read more
Facebook issued an official policy regarding anti-vaccination misinformation within advertisements back last March. It reads as follows … Combatting Vaccine Misinformation We are working to tackle vaccine misinformation on Facebook by reducing its distribution and providing people with authoritative information on the topic. We are starting by taking a series of steps: We will reduce the … Read more
Did you know that Harry Houdini and Abraham Lincoln were good friends and would often meet up? For example, see the picture above. There is of course one rather glaring flaw here. Lincoln was rather famously assassinated on 15 April 1865, and Houdini was born after that in 1874. How then is a picture such … Read more
Your are perhaps familiar with the term “grassroots“. In a political context this is bottom up – it is collective action from the local level to effect change at the local, regional, national, or international level. Astroturfing is where malicious forces promote propaganda that is designed to look and feel like a grassroots movement, but … Read more
A couple of days ago Newsweek published a fabulous article titled “9 ANTI-VAXXER MYTHS DEBUNKED“. There they proceed to demolish these 9 myths … Vaccinations cause autism. Vaccines don’t really work. Vaccines contain toxins. Vaccines can overwhelm a baby’s immune system. Natural immunity is safer than vaccine-acquired immunity. There are effective natural and homeopathic alternatives … Read more