archive.is link, if you hit a paywall: https://archive.ph/RF9jn
Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets his first national town hall with NewsNation, as the media grapples with another conspiratorial candidate. “There’s a difference between giving him a town hall and just covering his candidacy,” one network executive says.
You’ll remember that few weeks back, Joe Rogan challenged vaccine researcher Peter Hotez to debate RFK on his podcast.
When Hotez rightfully refused (I mean, what is the point of debating a pigeon), Elon Musk couldn’t resist piling on – accusing Hotez of being “scared” of debate. Cue the hooting across the bird site. (The whole thing reminded me of that scene with the apes at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I digress).
Anyhoo, the whole Rogan-Hotez-Musk episode, aside from being a low point in U.S. social-scientific discourse, raises all sorts of questions about how deeply one engages kookiness.
I tend to fall into the “laugh and ignore” camp because scientific truth can never be settled by who yells the loudest, and … again, pigeons … but there is a lot of room for nuance in determining the best way to combat misinformation. Particularly among populations in a position to be hurt by it. (anti-VAX nonsense and the elderly being a prime example).
I don’t think giving a platform to ignorance debunks it. The people likely to be hornswoggled aren’t going to listen to the expert.
And there’s the problem that falsehoods are quick and easy to produce but can take time and effort to debunk.
In the time it takes you to debunk one claim, the anti-vaxxer can spew a dozen more. For you to win, you need to debunk everything they say. For them to win, they just need to keep spewing garbage with no evidence until you run out of time to debunk.
I really feel as though this new age of the Internet has given rise to allowing any self important asshole with money the ability to perpetrate lies and feed the beast of propaganda. Anytime I hear someone even mention Joe Rogan I immediately know they’re going to spew some idiotic viewpoints without any significant merit as well as making it impossible to refute their viewpoint. It’s veiled intellectualism.