Liberals Should Not Emulate Their Foes in Spreading Disinformation Online
November 27, 2024
It’s deeply disappointing to see people on the political left translating their frustration over Donald Trump’s election victory into efforts to mirror the right’s information-distortion strategies. Your parents taught you that two wrongs don’t make a right, and that applies to politics and digital information skirmishing.
Our friends at NewsGuard are doing their characteristically diligent job chronicling disinformation regardless of its origins. From a recent dispatch from the firm’s “Reality Check” series:
What happened: Liberals opposed to Donald Trump’s choice of anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services are falsely claiming that smallpox was never eradicated and that it is being held in check by vaccines.
A closer look: The false claim appears to have emerged from a since-deleted Nov. 14 X post by a woman named Karen Piper, whose X profile describes her as “Just another girl with a PhD.”
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose Trump and his choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., a longtime purveyor of conspiracy theories. But twisting the truth isn’t the way to resist Trump’s return to power. Blurring the line between fact and fiction only aids Trump’s larger effort to convince Americans that it’s impossible to determine what’s true about science, immigration, crime, and countless other topics. In the absence of a shared factual consensus, Trump demands the public defer to his version of the truth. We’ve seen this phenomenon before in countries like Russia.
As for the question of smallpox, NewsGuard elaborated:
Piper posted a photo of a child whose face was apparently covered with smallpox, alongside the text: “Say hello to smallpox. It was never eradicated; it’s held in check by vaccines, which RFK Jr. says he will eliminate coverage for, making vaccines ‘optional.’” The post generated at least 429,000 views and 11,500 likes before it was deleted. (Piper issued a correction to her post on Nov. 15, stating, “Correction: It was eradicated BY VACCINES. It’s really an amazing story about the wonders of vaccines.”)
Nevertheless, the narrative was soon advanced in a post by the liberal Facebook page Occupy Democrats, which used the same text and photo as Piper’s original post, along with a photo of Kennedy.
The Occupy Democrats post, shared to the page’s 10 million followers, garnered 7,900 shares within six days, and spread further on X, Threads, Instagram, and Bluesky.
Actually: Smallpox was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980, after the last known naturally transmitted case of the disease was documented in Somalia in 1977….
There’s no need to make up false healthcare-related claims made by Kennedy. NewsGuard has documented 92 false claims actually advanced by Kennedy and his anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense in our RFK Jr. Healthcare Claims Depository.
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