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If we can't turn to our celebrities, how we know what to think?

Social media companies like Facebook and Youtube don't help enough. They're trying, but they could do more. For example, when you try to report a post, there's no option for 'dangerous conspiracy theory'. Facebook should write to admins of groups and tell them that if they don't start vetting all posts, and getting rid of these poisonous and dangerous conspiracy theories, the group will be closed down. They could start employing more people - it's not like there isn't a labour force available and it's not like they don't have the money. It's the willingness that they don't have. As long as Facebook, Google etc al can keep earning money of ridiculous conspiracy theories, they'll never be too quick to remove this shite.

>there's no option for 'dangerous conspiracy theory'

Why would there be? In their world this is free speech, and free speech must never be curtailed. If people didn't want to see it, they wouldn't watch it. If they didn't watch it, the algorithm wouldn't show it to them. If the algorithm didn't show it to them, they wouldn't be able to take their advertising cut.

Social media companies don't help _at all_. The sooner we force them to be responsible about the content they sell, the better.

Charge people. I get less (no?) fake scam post/mail as it's too expensive. Charge people instead of relying on advertising and data collection for funds. Then the scammers/nutters have to think really hard if they want to spend their cash spreading lies.

If someone tells me "I CAN make a perpetual motion machine" most stop when asked to spend their own money doing it... sadly not all do.

Free speech should never be curtailed? No maybe not, but facebook isn't democracy. Free speech when it infringes upon the rights of others is not what free speech is for. Why not curtail the platforms these nutjobs can use, it's harmful to do otherwise?

There are not that many utterly delusional conspiracy theorists. Mostly they live in their social media echo chambers doing no damage to anything but each other. Instead of monitoring the entire world for nutty posts it would be cheaper to keep the echo chamber for nutters only by not showing links to their content to the rest of the world.

"amplified by celebrities like Amanda Holden, Woody Harrelson, boxer Amir Khan and John Cusack."

Start with these. Prosecute them for incitement.

Just make sure that they never get any work in the future. They won't be celebs of any list then.

The problem with removing peoples' careers is that some of them become Andrew Wakefield. Try a little education first. Only the hard core conspiracy nuts will find some excuse to get around "Iran has had tragic loses from CV-19 but has no 5G at all". Sometimes you will get celebrities to publicly apologise and occasionally do a little thinking before opening their mouths.

...or at least always refer to them as, e.g., "mast-er baiter Woody Harrelson".

"mast-er baiter"

I believe the technical term for these morons is, "Tw@s" or "Funts".

I think just "wankers" is better.

For the UK "celebrities", a little bit of community service helping out the NHS would be appreciated.

I'm sure Amanda would do a fine job washing dirty scrubs.

Amir maybe a little harder - I'm not sure which job he could do without quitting halfway through.

It never ceases to surprise me how stupid someone can be and still fit into society... then I realised it's the clever ones that struggle to fit in.

How can the same species produce both engineers that can design and build this stuff, and the clueless idiots that can burn it down based on some BS Facebook campaign.

If intelligence were expressed as height, we'd have mountains striding along with puddles... it just doesn't make sense.

"...It never ceases to surprise me how stupid someone can be and still fit into society... then I realised it's the clever ones that struggle to fit in..."

Sad, isn't it? We have kids who "want to be famous" when they grow up. Not even in any specific area: just "famous".

We used to hold scientists and engineers in great esteem. They were people worthy of respect, whereas these days you get that if you can kick a ball around a field or pretend to be someone else on a screen.

That isn't to say they can't make mistakes or self-promote stupid ideas (or even dangerous ones) or succumb to money etc, but that's the beauty of science "so you claim this... let's replicate it and see if you're right".

Personal Saying:

Never underestimate the stupidity of people.

You know how stupid the average person is ?

Half the people are more stupid than that.

Well worth looking up Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by economist Carlo M Cippola.

He defined a "Stupid Person" as someone who repeatedly behaved in a manner which harmed everyone for no personal gain to themselves. So more based on behaviours rather than any ability to pass an IQ test.

And there are more Stupid People around than you'd imagine (for UK I'd say a first approximation could be 17.4m or maybe 13.9m?)

You can include my 79 year old mother in those statistics, she a full Dunnng Krugger. She believes that she is immune to COVID-19 and moans to us when people moan to hear being out and about. She goes out walking for 6 hours a day desperately going round supermarkets trying to find someone to talk to. She hangs around in the queues and when the security gurad says she can go in she tells him she's not here to buy anything, so he has to tell her to "Go Home" but then she argues and moans why people shout abuse at her but her belief is steadfast. Even if myself and my sister have sworn and shouted at her to stay inside but it's no use as she still goes out. We have even rang the Police to have a word with her but it still did not make a difference.

I still know someone here in the UK who will NOT drink milk just in case any Nuclear fallout (from Chernobyl) is still present in any grass in Wales etc.

Rather than simple arson is this not classifiable as treason?

i.e. Damaging critical national infrastructure in case of national emergency?

Although it might be wise for the media to point out in no uncertain terms that the maximum sentence for arson is life imprisonment.

Of course how many people are using 5G currently is debatable but could easily take out other infrastructure at the same time.

I like this idea. "If you are going to be publicly stupid, the public will punish you severely" is an excellent position (to claim, at the very least).

Not sure about the treason part, but I agree, it's damaging critical infrastructure. These towers that are getting torched typically have a lot of equipment on them and the 5G equipment. So while you might be torching the 5G equipment, you're also torching everything else. Many towers share space with other carriers and some also include public safety radio equipment.

>>So while you might be torching the 5G equipment, you're also torching everything else.

Do you really think these radicalized douchebags care? An unholy mix of dippy environmentals, unhinged rightwing loons and vested interest scam cure salesmen. All ripe for brainwashing by social media after almost a decade of high-volume lying and skull-fuckery.

Weep.

I think you left out religious nutters (the base religion isn't important) and alternative medicine advocates have been the two big areas I have noticed - the desire for "a cure that ails them" that requires no changes to their lifestyle seems to be an underlying theme.

Unfortunately, fixing this is hard - education can address the issue but many have already been let down by educational institutes or outright rejected them. Altering someone's opinions about a disease or a treatments is difficult when the disease is hard to treat or the treatment is not 100% effective and the person is directly affected by a negative outcome.

If little Geoff died while receiving the best hospital care available while little Timmy recovered from the same thing using just essential oils, which option do you think they will recommend? They rarely see the larger picture of untreated patients dying while they focus on their new search for "truth" amongst scams and lies.

You forgot to account for the technical abilities of delusional arsonists. It is amazing that they can tell the difference between a cell tower and a doughnut shop. There is no way they could spot the difference between 5G and 4G - or something older. If they actually torch something 5G it will almost certainly be [1]collateral damage .

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1353904/Paediatrician-attack-People-dont-want-no-paedophiles-here.html

Two weeks ago, feeling that something had to be done rather than just sitting around at home doing nothing, I sent out a chain letter to my friends, urging people to wear masks and to put pressure on the government to produce more test kits so that we could beat, not the virus itself, but the spread of the epidemic. I asked them to join me in volunteering to work for free for such an effort, and to forward this letter to as many people as possible.

This is what one of them sent me back in reply:

"There is a lot going on in the background which has made me very anxious.

So many factors that am not sure that I can be eloquent.

There is the rise of 5G and its introduction in Wuhan and whether there is an interaction with the virus. Either way 5G is very bad news indeed.

Bill Gates, Soros and maybe a few other billionaires with an agenda to bump off the elderly - is this part of New World Order, with open borders, Marxist, left wing dominance.

Chinese Communist Party is responsible for this virus either maliciously ie deliberately in a lab or accidentally in the crazy primitive wet markets or escaped from a lab .....in any case they suppressed info from rest of the world for 6 weeks or more thereby allowing the world to become infected.

Shanghai, Bejing etc hardly suffered at all.

China has very quickly recovered and now is buying cheap US and British shares and western economies are being decimated and personal livelihoods destroyed.

Deomcrats agenda to overthrow Trump - screwing up the economy was in their plans in January.

Thousands die every year from the flu, the numbers from this virus may be even less.

A better policy would have been to quarantine the over 70s or over 65s even plus all those younger with existing illnesses.

There is very much a left wing thinking that has been allowed to unduly influence both Boris and Trump.

Fear, panic and bullying police state has been drummed into us, unnaturally so.

There is indeed something going on ....."

Another friend said,"I've spoken to my husband, and while we would like to help you, we feel that..."

Needless to say, the chain letter didn't get very far, but at least I subsequently read that the UK government's policy is becoming increasingly aligned with my [unheard] recommendations.

No point engaging with these people.

Time to put this person on your block list and delete them from your contacts.

It's the only way to be sure.

In my case, I can't. She's the mother of my kids. Obvs., we are separated.

They left out the anti-vaxxers bit.

And the meat-eating bit.

And the alkaline diet bit.

And the flat earth bit.

And the creationism bit.

Nope, not yet seen a CT that conflates flat-earth-ism or creationism with coronavirus. But everything else, from 5G via Bill Gates to vaccination and veganism, yup.

When searching for details about the link between 5G and CORVID-19, Bill Gates seems to come up a lot - I'm not sure what Bill did to upset most of these people but "Bill Gates experimented on Africans and now he's going to release some terrible CORVID-19 vaccine on the world after spreading the virus by 5G, just ask anyone from Africa" seemed to be a recurring theme.

The anti-vaxxers are taking advantage of CV19 to further their agenda (WTF *that* is I am not really sure; I can only assume that *somebody* is making good money out of it). Bill Gates is a vocal proponent of vaccination in third world countries. His logic is simple; if parents know that their children will live to adulthood, they'll have two instead of eight, and those kids will be healthier and better educated, and poverty will be reduced.

One upon a time we locked these sort of people up for their own good.

You can find all that and more on Russia Today. They are the primary source of much of it but are happy to pick up any trending rubbish that they like the sound of.

Would pointing that out make things better or worse?

Is something as warped as that seen as a fit and proper person to clean toilet bowls, let alone look after any living thing?

I think it was motherhood itself that scrambled her brains.

The minds of the arsonists are similar in all respects...

Let’s hope they can’t replicate themselves at the same speed.

If you consider the ideas rather than those having them, then like the virus, the ideas need to infect a host to spread further. But the speed of ideas varies between the speed of sound and the speed of light these days. So, good luck with that.

>The minds of the arsonists are similar in all respects...

Unfortunately viruses evolve

Idiots don't

Unfortunately, idiocy grows just like virus do

I have flagged hundreds of these demented conpiracy theorists to FB over the past few weeks, but apparently they do nothing to take them down. The only action that I have seen on their part is against somebody looking for partners to raid and torch a tower. Very sick!

Be careful - you may get on FBs ignore list. I did similar (on a different platform), reporting posts inciting murder, and all that happened was my ability to report was taken away.

Free speech, defined as 'say what you like without consequence', is not a thing that any civilised place can support.

Before you downvote, is a place that protects the right of people to call for murder civilised?

>Before you downvote, is a place that protects the right of people to call for murder civilised?

What if they had found a dossier on the internet ?

As a lot of infrastructure will use 5G, could we just have a FB button which people press which says "I dont want to use 5G". This sends details to their supplier who stops their phone from working "over 5G".

Along the idea of "I dont think motorways are a good idea they cause pollution. Why is there no food in the shops?"

Damn, I used to like Woody Harrelson.

Reg writers, if you need more corona-mania, the BBC claim, " [1]Iran's Guards unveil 'magnetic' virus detection tool ." It sounds depressingly familiar...

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52289273?ns_mchannel=social&ns_source=twitter&ns_campaign=bbc_live&ns_linkname=5e96dddf936d6e0661c64463%26Iran%27s%20Guards%20unveil%20%27magnetic%27%20virus%20detection%20tool%262020-04-15T10%3A38%3A28.177Z&ns_fee=0&pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:02873563-0ffe-43b1-a287-0b0c0b30b6f1&pinned_post_asset_id=5e96dddf936d6e0661c64463&pinned_post_type=share

There's some redemption, though:

"Update 15:15: Observers have pointed out the device was similar to fake bomb detectors sold in the region, for which people have already been detained, [1]as we reported in 2014 ."

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29459896

Its ironic the platforms which allow the spreading of this dog s*it information is subjectively doing more damage to the world than 5G ever could.

Even more ironic that 5G would allow these same nutjobs to spread this same dog s*it information in 4K HDR with low latency live to millions of people.

If all networks were brought offline tomorrow they'd start a new anti LAMESTREAM media group about how licking stamps turns kids into autistic frogs.