Last night, just after getting yesterday’s post up, I caught the beginning of “Amanpour & Co.” which featured a segment with Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician and epidemiologist, senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the editor at large of Kaiser Health News. She’s also Grant Wahl’s wife. After her recent piece in the New York Times, Amanpour had her on to talk about misinformation, specifically around COVID-19 vaccinations, and how her loss became a central piece of propaganda for purveyors of misinformation online.
This led me to look for her other recent appearances on the topic. She’s been on NPR, CBS, and the “PBS Newshour,” among other outlets. She tells the story of how she wanted to get the truth about Grant’s death out to the public as soon as possible. Her quick efforts seemed to tamp down a lot of the initial misinformation, but after more misinformation started filling social media sites following Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest on the field just a few weeks later, she felt it was important to head into the breach once again.
One of the ways she recommends fighting these conspiracy theories is by pairing facts with empathy. But how do we do it at scale? Not all of us have access to the New York Times op-ed page. And with companies like Twitter gutting their content moderation teams, even the entities which were once trying to battle mis- and disinformation at a large scale are throwing in the towel under the guise of “free speech.”
I wish I could be more hopeful about these efforts, but the game of Whac-A-Mole we have to employ to combat all that’s out there is just not sustainable. And the pending machine-learning revolution is only going to bake our existing shortcomings into the ones and zeros of machines repeating the same poor decision making which got us into this predicament in the first place, only now at potentially quantum speeds.
I was stunned when Grant died. I wrote about it as best I could shortly after it happened. I still shake my head in disbelief when thinking about what a shock it was. And is. If there’s one good thing to come out of all this it’s Dr. Gounder’s efforts to cement Grant’s legacy in a beneficial, meaningful way. By protecting and empowering Grant’s memory, whether it ends up being through a journalism award or scholarship, and potentially putting out an anthology of his work, the ideas and ideals he stood for can live on long after his final whistle.
Blow Up the Outside World
13 January 2023
The heart of the matter.
Last night, just after getting yesterday’s post up, I caught the beginning of “Amanpour & Co.” which featured a segment with Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician and epidemiologist, senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the editor at large of Kaiser Health News. She’s also Grant Wahl’s wife. After her recent piece in the New York Times, Amanpour had her on to talk about misinformation, specifically around COVID-19 vaccinations, and how her loss became a central piece of propaganda for purveyors of misinformation online.
This led me to look for her other recent appearances on the topic. She’s been on NPR, CBS, and the “PBS Newshour,” among other outlets. She tells the story of how she wanted to get the truth about Grant’s death out to the public as soon as possible. Her quick efforts seemed to tamp down a lot of the initial misinformation, but after more misinformation started filling social media sites following Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest on the field just a few weeks later, she felt it was important to head into the breach once again.
One of the ways she recommends fighting these conspiracy theories is by pairing facts with empathy. But how do we do it at scale? Not all of us have access to the New York Times op-ed page. And with companies like Twitter gutting their content moderation teams, even the entities which were once trying to battle mis- and disinformation at a large scale are throwing in the towel under the guise of “free speech.”
I wish I could be more hopeful about these efforts, but the game of Whac-A-Mole we have to employ to combat all that’s out there is just not sustainable. And the pending machine-learning revolution is only going to bake our existing shortcomings into the ones and zeros of machines repeating the same poor decision making which got us into this predicament in the first place, only now at potentially quantum speeds.
I was stunned when Grant died. I wrote about it as best I could shortly after it happened. I still shake my head in disbelief when thinking about what a shock it was. And is. If there’s one good thing to come out of all this it’s Dr. Gounder’s efforts to cement Grant’s legacy in a beneficial, meaningful way. By protecting and empowering Grant’s memory, whether it ends up being through a journalism award or scholarship, and potentially putting out an anthology of his work, the ideas and ideals he stood for can live on long after his final whistle.
See you tomorrow?