Life During Wartime

It’s war right now, right here, on social media. Every time you engage an anti-masker or an anti-vaxxer, you are unwittingly perpetuating the war, unless you are aware that the discourse on which you are embarking has been poisoned, and significantly change your strategy accordingly. If you imagine that you are discussing masks or vaccines or other reasonable public health measures with just another human being, whose opinions happen to differ from yours, you will be completely immolated in the conversation, and you will have wasted all of your time, energy, and sanity.

Whether they know it or not, the “anti” crowd has a huge amount of skillfully orchestrated energy behind them, against which you, lone debater, are almost entirely powerless. This is by design, and it seems to be working beautifully so far. One reason why it’s working beautifully is that we keep playing right into it, and we lack key awareness and a ground in what is actually occurring. Armed with facts about the reality of what has happened to the discourse on vaccines, the discussions change, the energy changes, and we have a fighting chance. Without them, we are part of the problem, no matter how well-intentioned our arguments are.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about a concerted, global, long term campaign on social media to weaponize, exaggerate, and poison the discourse around vaccines and public health. When we encounter someone from the “anti” crowd, we are unwittingly actually encountering a whole global network of intentionally divisive disinformation, spread very effectively over perhaps the past 10 years, or longer. We are not actually arguing with a person, but staring down a brilliant campaign that has been highly successful, is organized, has a very few centralized outlets, but has vast reach and holds sway over increasing numbers of gullible, frightened people who don’t trust science or medicine.

In September, 2018, Broniatowski et al. published “Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate.” Their research convincingly showed that bots and trolls engaged in an organized effort to sow division, spread disinformation, and disrupt conversation about vaccines, and that the preponderance of the disruptive and provocative tweets, texts, or comments were toward the anti-vaccination “side.”

In a study that I summarized previously , (Johnson et al. 2020), the researchers found that anti-vaccine views spread more rapidly and more widely than views supportive of vaccines. Both studies put together (and others) show a clear and convincing pattern of willful, intentionally malicious efforts to sway American public opinion against vaccines.

It’s been highly effective.

Have you ever felt especially frustrated, trying to convince an anti-vaccine person of the safety and public health benefits of vaccines, by their uncanny knack for stating false equivalencies? For suddenly switching horses mid argument? For introducing non-congruent science (the most recent I saw was Muller’s Ratchet, suggested as the way that polio and smallpox have been eliminated from our population, rather than vaccines)? Have you noticed that the “anti” crowd seems eerily scripted? Zombie-like and absolutely beyond the reach of any evidence or argument? Safely protected in their beliefs behind the ironic conviction that they have access to special or secret knowledge?

That is a direct result of the anti-vaccination war that has been waged on social media for years.

When you try to “discuss” vaccines with people who are poisoned by this psychological warfare, you are only making it worse. One of the goals of those behind the campaign is not just to persuade people that vaccines are dangerous or unnecessary. It’s also to sow division, discord, and ill will in the populace. The goal is to create chaos. It does appear to be working.

It has helped me tremendously to remember that the discourse has been willfully, intentionally poisoned. Instead of arguing about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, a lot of the time now I just post a link to the articles above. It probably has no effect on those who have already been poisoned, but it gets the idea out there to people who get involved in these unwinnable, absolutely fruitless arguments, where the “other side” is strangely zombie-like, scripted, cannot be pinned down, rejects evidence, constantly moves the goal posts. They have become useful idiots in the campaign.

The trouble is, when we engage, we also become useful idiots. The goals of the campaign are not only to reduce confidence in vaccines, but also in general to sow division and discord. If I keep in mind that I am talking with someone whose mind has been won over in a long term strategy of psychological warfare, I am bound to engage in totally different ways, or not engage at all.

For one thing, things generally go very differently if I approach “anti” people more like cult members than rational actors. This is a very powerful switch. There’s a ton of research on how to talk with cult members successfully. We may well be in terra incognita also, looking at communication conundrums that we have not ever faced before, at least not on this scale.

But my goal now, at least, is to remember that a person from the “anti” set of positions has been poisoned by highly effective propaganda, and to treat them accordingly.