• In Shira Ovide’s excellent On Tech essay of the same name in the NYT, Let’s Clean Up a Toxic Internet disparages the junk being thrown out there (e.g. the crafted misinformation of Pl**dem*c) by dubious actors who often stand to gain despite the secondary injury to the public. This carefully knitted crap, all designed to appeal to people’s paranoia and fears, is an insidious affront to science (and sometimes to democracy itself) and should be condemned. Ovide hopes that the larger social media purveyors will increasingly work together to identify and block this stuff and that we’ll all get better both at recognizing it and understanding how it is promulgated. Let’s work to promote truth over fiction.
