How Social Media Hacks Your Brain

The Algorithm exploits multiple inherent cognitive biases, and it is contributing to the COVID infodemic.

Medical misinformation is nothing new, but I think we can all agree that the coronavirus pandemic has added fuel to the misinformation fire. For the first time in modern memory, we have a medical issue that literally affects everyone, and it’s a particularly scary one — emerging out of nowhere, with a bizarre range of effects from asymptomatic illness to particularly disturbing deaths, to bizarre long-haul symptoms.

But there’s another culprit, besides COVID-19 itself that has led to this so-called infodemic — that’s social media.

But how? How exactly does social media lead us to bad inference? I don’t have a huge social media presence, but I have enough that I’ve seen the dark side of things.

Here’s someone who opens calling me a quack, but it gets quite a bit worse from there.

Here’s someone saying that a video I made about blood type and covid-19 was a deliberate fraud.