BRAINWASHING DANGER

Re: Rob Donkin’s letter TB 23 Oct, I think most of us have had to deal with these conspiracy arguments from friends and relatives.

I believe the way our social media platforms are engineered has a lot to answer for.

The use of these platforms has seemingly produced a significant portion of our population to become incensed with conspiracy theories related to government/big Brother wanting to control our lives. The platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are engineered to seek out similar information related to a person’s search history, which in turn bombards the recipient with material that supports their way of thinking. Much of this material purports to be supported by robust statistics from government and scientific websites and to be written by scientific and analytic experts. Apart from the fact that governments are nowhere near smart enough to be able to collude with each other to implement nanotechnology to infect everybody on a global scale, these platforms have trained a whole generation of people to trust the platform to provide reliable and accurate data. This is far from the

truth. There is no objective analysis of the data because the machine only provides a one-sided view. These subjective articles generally rely on data being inappropriately massaged in a way that suits an argument.

Any good consultant building a business case will ask the client what result they want before massaging the data to suit.

And a significant proportion of our population are fully ignorant of the research methods required to reach valid conclusions to their arguments.

The internet is loaded with people who are willing to share the results of their own analyses, much of which are based on untested hypotheses.

As we will be fully exposed to Covid in the next few months as we open up, will the social media platforms be held to account for producing a large segment of population who will become exposed to potential death of serious illness with “long Covid” consequences? I think not. And this segment of the population is so thoroughly brainwashed that they will not take a step back and reevaluate their positions.

PETER HEILBRONN.

Annandale.