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In short letter published on 13 November in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, five Swiss and French researchers draw attention to an aspect of “dialogue” in the age of social media that we would not have thought possible a few years ago:
Several authors of [cette méta-analyse]suffered a violent campaign of cyber harassment on social media, received hundreds of insults, xenophobic messages, anonymous telephones and intimidation, including death threats. These actions were accompanied by the public sharing of contact details, including the postal addresses of the authors, on Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members.
Such campaigns have long become commonplace in the cultural or media sector: the stars of the scene as well as journalists are regularly subjected to hostile, even hateful, comments for posting or saying something on a controversial topic.
But in science it is rarer. The name that appears most often is that of Paul Offit. Since 2009, this professor of pediatrics at General Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, has been the target of hostile attacks, including death threats, for his stances against pseudoscience in general and anti-vaccination quacks in particular. More recently, relationships revealed the strategies common to these campaigns: they are coordinated on an Internet forum (Facebook, Reddit or other), one or more people propose the “topic” to be used and identify, if necessary, the “target” employer “Or one of his relatives … In 2018, pharmacist Olivier Bernard, known as Pharmachien, became such a target for a blog post where he rejected the usefulness of vitamin C injections against patients undergoing chemotherapy (his positions earned him in 2019 an international dissemination award).
It was therefore to be feared that the irrational passions aroused by hydroxychloroquine would in turn cause this type of slip. The five authors, in fact, lend their support to a Brazilian colleague, Marcus Lacerda, who faced a similar campaign last spring. As reported in June a report of Infectious disease of the lancet, the pre-publication, a few weeks earlier, of what was then the first clinical test with a control group on the efficacy of chloroquine (and which led to negative results) was soon followed by a hostile campaign on social media. Apparently it was launched by an American right-wing activist who, on Twitter, presented the study as “funded by the left”; the Brazilian president’s son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, had forwarded the accusation to his two million Twitter followers, and anger ensued.
“This behavior serves a purpose,” the five researchers write in their November 13 letter. “Frighten researchers and doctors and silence them. However, silence would be the worst answer to this type of behavior, making societies vulnerable to populism and obscurantism. “
How information circulates and how it is perceived and understood by a part of the public is also part of the problem. As Brazilian researcher Marcus Lacerda said in June: “When we first announced that we would be testing chloroquine to treat COVID-19, we were seen as heroes in Brazil, people sent us messages of encouragement and everyone was excited. “But when the study results came out, the attitude changed dramatically.
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