comment: >
context: People need to stop acting like their emotions and personal beliefs matter at all when it comes to science. Your feelings don't matter, your opinion don't matter, only thing that matters when it comes to science is scientific evidence. >
  
  That's not the only problem.
  The biggest issue is that it is very easy(well, relatively easy) to take a real study and then use out of context quotes, or re-tell the results in a misleading way, or just outright lie about what the study says to further your misinformation agenda.
  The rebuttal to these can take hours of work to figure out depending on the specifics, and are way too labour intensive for the average person to even begin to do, and often require high level knowledge to even understand. It's an endless game of whack-a-mole, and has really exploded with the ever expanding echo chambers online. 
  Social media has really removed most kinds of nuance in favor of ingroup buzzwords and catchy or emotion inducing titles. >
  
  
  The biggest issue is that it is very easy(well, relatively easy) to take a real study and then use out of context quotes, or re-tell the results in a misleading way, or just outright lie about what the study says to further your misinformation agenda.
  
  I honestly feel like most of the misinformation out there doesn't even refer to research. It's just a bunch of weird claims that make references to "common sense",  as if that explains everything.
  As an example, there's that claim circulating that masks don't work because "if I fart I can still smell it through my pants". 
  How the fuck do you counter that in a way that reaches the people who buy into this crap? (Pun reluctantly intended.) >
  
  Depends what kind of misinformation you are looking at. I don't want to write too much but you can broadly categorize misinformation, and you're right that one of the common ones is the category of low effort memes, poorly made infographics or general low effort appeals to common sense. 
  The difference is that most people(hopefully) can at least tell that they are low effort arguments even if they agree with the sentiment, and if you CAN counter them they fall apart pretty fast. 
  The reason I brought up the ones I did is they are more labor intensive to argue against, and are often used in conspiracy groups, which the article is referencing. 
  The whole vaccine debate is filled to the brim with these kinds of junk science populists, misleading claims, out of context statistics, and straight up lies and has been this way for several decades. When you thoroughly debunk one thing, either people don't read the counter arguments, or they just make up something else and move to the next thing.
  The higher effort misinformation then leads to more downstream low effort misinformation as it gets repeated and memed and so on. >
  
  Everyone should leave twitter. >
  
  
  The rampant spread of conspiracy theories on Twitter has pushed Finland’s top health authority to stop using the platform to disseminate its public-health messages.
  A lack of proper tools on the social media site means the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare is unable to effectively weed out false and deliberately misleading information, as well as inappropriate comments, from replies to its posts, according to spokeswoman Marjo Loisa. It’s taken the decision to stop sharing to its almost 100,000 followers, freeing up resources from content moderation.
  “Our tweets and their comments are used as a platform for spreading disinformation and Twitter doesn’t provide proper tools to block this,” Loisa said in an emailed response to questions. “This has grown to be a major problem during the pandemic.” >
  
  This past weekend I went back to take a look at my old twitter account. I follow the editor of Scientific American, and scrolled through her feed. The posts are still interesting and have good content. The replies under each post were consistently dumpster files with derails, denials, and straight up hate. It used to be fun to be able to interact with people doing interesting things, but looking at the "discussions" now just kills any desire to wade into that kind of ugliness. Something pretty remarkable has been lost. >
  
  It has been like this for a very long time. Replies are often complete bullshit. There is no proper conversation at all, i don't know why businesses and government still use this shit platform. >
  
  How can there be good discussions when there is a character limit of 280. Anyone that has anything worth saying that carries deeper insight is blocked out, then all you're left with is snappy retorts, and eventually the masses find out that snappy retorts can be drowned by shitty retorts. >
  
  Exacerbated by the head of Twitter being a conspiracy theorist. >
  
  Everyone should quit Twitter. It’s run by a fascist propagandist. >
  
  Understandable decision. Trolls essentially used their audience to gain visibility to their agendas, and Twitter didn't provide tool to prevent this.