This season The Inoculation is focusing on politics and activism. We will explore how anti-vaccine views have left a mark on different political and activist movements in Europe and beyond. Daiva will be focusing on these issues as a Policy Leader fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Please and this show on Apple Podcasts,Audible,Google Podcasts, Spotify, or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation.

Elon Musk is making sweeping changes at Twitter. Does it mean that anti-vaccine disinformation and violent extremism will flourish? This is our last episode this year. Tune in when we’re back in January! Sources: @ElonJet: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/14/elon-jet-the-twitter-account-tracking-elon-musks-flights-was-permanently-suspended/ Musk and Qanon: https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pjkw/elon-musk-is-now-promoting-qanon End of COVID misinformation policy: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63796832  Anti-vax propaganda and hate speech on the rise: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-12-08/covid-misinformation-spiking-on-twitter-elon-musk/101742276  Climate denialism on the rise: https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/11/17/how-climate-disinformation-is-spreading-after-elon-musks-twitter-takeover & https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/02/climate-change-denialism-flooding-twitter-scientists  ISIS is back: https://gnet-research.org/2022/11/18/islamic-state-supporters-on-twitter-how-is-new-twitter-handling-an-old-problem/  It’s worse outside the Anglophone sphere: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03552-4.pdf  Prominent Ukrainians subject to ghost ban? https://twitter.com/maksymeristavi/status/1602793279015337988?t=RKEQB2Jxj4FY2YnE6lL-sA&s=19  EU plans to regulate Twitter: https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-social-media-misinformation-fd4227b138878a5b0e5129a4bdd5bac0  Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts,Audible,Google Podcasts, Spotify, or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation. Individually, we are on Mastodon too: Daiva at @[email protected] and Eva at @[email protected]

With Twitter in turmoil, we are inviting you to revisit our conversation with WF Thomas, a disinformation researcher. Eva talked to him while working on a story on audio disinformation, which was part of her Transatlantic Media Fellowship by the Heinrich Boell Foundation Washington, DC. You can read the BBC reporting on Russia’s Twitter network here and the New Yorker’s article on regulation here. Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts,Audible,Google Podcasts, Spotify, or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation. Individually, we are on Mastodon too: Daiva at @[email protected] and Eva at @[email protected]

As Dr. Oz loses his bid for a seat in the US Senate and the American Board of Internal Medicine moves to strip a falsehood-spreading doctor’s qualifications, we look at the phenomenon of medical doctors spreading COVID-19 disinformation on both sides of the Atlantic. In this episode, we reference our earlier work: - On homeopathy: https://www.theinoculation.com/homeopathy-a-pseudoscientific-gateway-to-anti-vaccine-views-and-covid-19-denialism/ - On a Swedish team that got an interview with Andrew Wakefield: https://www.theinoculation.com/how-anti-vaccination-movements-pull-parents-in/  Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts, Audible,Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation. Individually, we are on Mastodon too: Daiva at @[email protected] and Eva at @[email protected]   Links:  https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/210324-The-Disinformation-Dozen.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0256-5 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dr-oz-shouldnt-be-a-senator-or-a-doctor/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/27/anti-vaxxers-making-at-least-25m-a-year-from-publishing-on-substack

According to Pew Research, six-in-ten American adults accept at least one of New Age beliefs: psychics, spiritual energy, reincarmation and/or astrology. And overall, seven-in-ten women hold at least one New Age belief, compared to just over half of men. Research also shows that spiritual people are more likely to believe in COVID-19 conspiracies. That’s why in this episode we are looking at conspirituality — the merger of conspiracy theories and spiritual beliefs. We discuss the origins of the term, the different generations of conspirituality, and their influence today. We also talk to Dr. Eszter Szenes about the transatlantic links among conspiritual movements. To make sure you never miss our stories, please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts,Audible,Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation Sources: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/granola-and-guns-rise-conspirituality https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/17/eva-wiseman-conspirituality-the-dark-side-of-wellness-how-it-all-got-so-toxic ​​https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/12093/10485

Homeopathy, the principle that ‘like cures like’ even in trace amounts, came to be at a time when opium, blood-letting and alcohol were all common treatments for illnesses. Study after study, it has been proven not to work, and testing of homeopathic products appears to often fail to follow established ethics. But many European countries allow selling sugar pills with ‘memory’ water alongside clinically tested drugs. The idea of memory water also appeals to anti-vaccine entrepreneurs. And, as we discuss in this episode, homeopathic and anti-vaccine communities significantly overlap. Sources: https://en.rebaltica.lv/2021/02/who-spreads-the-vaccine-lies-in-the-baltics/  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/10/ginger-root-and-meteorite-dust-the-steiner-covid-cures-offered-in-germany  https://www.br.de/nachrichten/kultur/was-esoterik-mit-impfgegnern-zu-tun-hat,Sq9wIpr https://www.medmedia.at/relatus-med/homoeopathen-rufen-zu-corona-impfung-auf/  https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/resources/homeopathy

The prospect of a cold winter makes energy a hot topic in Europe. Russia, aiming to chip away at Western support for Ukraine, has an interest in stoking people’s fears. And where does Russia find enthusiastic supporters? You guessed it — among public health skeptics. This is the first episode of our 4th season, in which we will focus on Germany and the ways various health, energy and climate conspiracies link up there. For this episode we talked to GMFUS’s Bret Schafer and Kristine Berzina to learn about how Russia goes about shaping public opinion abroad. Here are some of the information sources used for this episode: Polling Nordstream 2: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1282647/umfrage/festhalten-am-projekt-nord-stream2/ Germans’ opinion now: https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Mehrheit-ist-gegen-Offnung-von-Nord-Stream-2-article23536541.html  Share of Russian gas in Europe: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201743/russian-gas-dependence-in-europe-by-country/ Dependency on Russia:https://www.statista.com/chart/26768/dependence-on-russian-gas-by-european-country/ Russian gas reserves: https://www.statista.com/topics/6207/russian-natural-gas-industry/#dossierKeyfigures   Imports: https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/russian-gas-imports-in-the-eu-threat-or-a-chance.html and: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/business/russia-gas-europe.html How Russia cut gas supplies: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60131520    Our earlier episodes: Episode 25 - Are Antivaxxers More Likely to be Pro-Putin? Episode 21 - The Falsehood Firehose: How Russian Disinformation Actors Spread Propaganda Episode 18 - How Anti-Vaccination Movements Pull Parents In Episode 17 - Fight Against Vaccine, Climate Disinformation Linked: Expert Episode 11 - Social Media, Russia, Disinformation -- GMFUS' Bret Shafer Episode 10 - 'Superspreaders of Malign' -- Disinformation Expert Miriam Matthews Talks About Russian Information Manipulation

We previously reported that robots can spew out new kinds of disinformation. But can they also help detect and flag it? To find out, Eva talked to researcher Giovanni Da San Martino, who is researching natural language processing at the University of Padova. Here are some links to relevant studies: https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-tutorials.2.pdf https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1783004 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2104235118  https://spj.sciencemag.org/journals/hds/2022/9858292/ And we invite you to listen to our story on a Spanish-language news service that targets misinformation. This is the last episode of this season. We’ll be back in September. To make sure you never miss our stories, please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts,Audible,Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation

Our story from Malta has made it to the Solutions Story Tracker — a rigorously curated database run by the Solutions Journalism Network. So today we invite you to revisit this story and hear an update on what the Mediterranean island country did to vaccinate its population against COVID-19. If you’re interested in vaccine mandates, you will probably enjoy our earlier episode on the topic. Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts,Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation

Researching the benefits of situations where people come together to solve puzzles or make decisions, Cecilie Steenbuch Traberg realised that there is a dark side of collective intelligence. This led her to research fake news. When her team showed simulated social media posts, accurate or not, to a sample of Americans, it emerged that liberals more than conservatives judge information as reliable, even when it isn’t, when it comes from a source they trust. So The Inoculation team contacted Cecilie Steenbuch Traberg to find out more. You can read her and Sander van der Linden’s paper here. The tweet mentioned by Eva is here. Please subscribe to our newsletter, and this show on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify or another platform of your choice. Follow us on Facebook as @theinoculation, on Twitter as @TInoculation, and on Instagram as @the_inoculation