Dr. Mercola and the “dirty dozen” that produces two thirds of all disinformation no-vax- breaking latest news

“The no-vax appeal is a call to die,” he says Mario Draghi. But also Joe Biden a week ago, he had used equally crude expressions towards those who spread disinformation on the consequences of the coronavirus and on the effectiveness of vaccines. The American president was particularly angry with the social networks accused of “killing people” because they allow false information about Covid and cures to circulate freely on their channels.

Under accusation, as usual, especially Facebook which conveys about three quarters of social media traffic through its various networks, from Instagram to WhatsApp. It is a long-established and well-known phenomenon, but slowdown in the US vaccination campaignjust when the most aggressive variants return to fill the hospitals and to claim victims almost always (97%) among the people of the unvaccinated, it increases the political and social alarm for the behavior of disinformers and social networks that do not block their false messages.

In the spotlight above all the “dirty dozen” of 12 individuals who alone produced two-thirds of the false content against immunizations circulated in the United States. Among them, in second place in terms of danger, also Robert Kennedy Jr, son of Bob Kennedy and grandson of JFK, the American president killed in Dallas. But, in addition to the ideologues of the no-vax, there are also among the twelve many characters who have profited from their unscientific proselytism, selling untested, unauthorized, and sometimes even harmful, counseling services or alleged alternative medicine products.

The New York Times tells the story of Joseph Mercola, a 67-year-old osteopathic physician who, with over three million followers on its Facebook pages in English, Spanish and other languages, leads the ranking of social danger. For decades Mercola, who denounced a assets of over $ 100 million, spread poisons against mainstream medicine by advertising and selling unauthorized alternative treatments and of unverified effectiveness: repeatedly denounced and fined by federal regulators, Mercola once also negotiated by giving three million dollars in compensation to the patients he had cheated, in addition to paying hefty fines.

All this did not stop him from returning to the office with anti Covid vaccines: a February called them a “medical fraud”, claiming that they alter the genetic code by transforming the vaccinee’s organism into an unstoppable factory of viral proteins. All false but in a few hours his article was translated into various languages, from Spanish to Polish and viewed hundreds of thousands of times on social media (Mercola also has 300,000 followers on Twitter and 400,000 on YouTube) greedy for traffic.

But now the health emergency can become there grave of total freedom and irresponsibility for the contents placed on the Net which the world of digital media has enjoyed (unlike the rest of publishing) since its inception thanks to a 1996 law. opportunity to eliminate or drastically limit Section 230 of that law that at the dawn of the digital age guaranteed total immunity to some companies that were just born at the time and which, in the meantime, have become omnipotent giants.

Thursday the Democratic Senator from Minnesota Amy Klobuchar, very active on the antitrust front with its bills for which it has always been concerned with building a bipartisan consensus, presented in the Senate another rule according to which (if approved) social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would lose their immunity if they did not prevent the dissemination of false information on serious health emergencies such as Covid-19 on their channels. However, this is a delicate issue from the point of view of government intervention because it would be up to the Ministry of Health to establish which contents are false and dangerous for public health and which are not. Of course, social networks should, however, be judged by the courts. But they would lose their current protections.