comment: >
  
  
  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.”
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.