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Medicine

Misleading Virus Video, Pushed By the Trumps, Spreads Online (nytimes.com) 566

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: In a video posted Monday online, a group of people calling themselves "America's Frontline Doctors" and wearing white medical coats spoke against the backdrop of the Supreme Court in Washington, sharing misleading claims about the virus, including that hydroxychloroquine was an effective coronavirus treatment and that masks did not slow the spread of the virus. [...] The members of the group behind Monday's video say they are physicians treating patients infected with the coronavirus. But it was unclear where many of them practice medicine or how many patients they had actually seen. As early as May, anti-Obamacare conservative activists called the Tea Party Patriots Action reportedly worked with some of them to advocate loosening states' restrictions on elective surgeries and nonemergency care. On July 15, the group registered a website called "America's Frontline Doctors," domain registration records show. One of the first copies of the video that appeared on Monday was posted to the Tea Party Patriots' YouTube channel, alongside other videos featuring the members of "America's Frontline Doctors."

The video did not appear to be anything special. But within six hours, President Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. had tweeted versions of it, and the right-wing news site Breitbart had shared it. It went viral, shared largely through Facebook groups dedicated to anti-vaccination movements and conspiracy theories such as QAnon, racking up tens of millions of views. Multiple versions of the video were uploaded to YouTube, and links were shared through Twitter. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter worked feverishly to remove it, but by the time they had, the video had already become the latest example of misinformation about the virus that has spread widely. That was because the video had been designed specifically to appeal to internet conspiracists and conservatives eager to see the economy reopen, with a setting and characters to lend authenticity. It showed that even as social media companies have sped up response time to remove dangerous virus misinformation within hours of its posting, people have continued to find new ways around the platforms' safeguards. [...] At least one version of the video, viewed by The Times on Facebook, was watched over 16 million times.

Comment Re:Oh no! (Score 3, Insightful) 179

I think the success of the iTunes Music Store has shown that people don't care too much about DRM as long as it is transparent enough. Look at what URGE will offer. 9.95 for unlimited music. Anything you want. For those not willing to break the law to pirate music, or too lazy to do so, or both (this third category includes me) this is an awesome deal. For just 10 bucks a month, it's as if my music collection was essentially infinite. I don't care if I don't "own" the music. Why should I? For movies, it makes even more sense (because the replay value is much lower than for music) to have some sort of subscription-type system so that you just pay a flat fee per month and have unlimited access to unlimited movies. But to have such systems (either music or movies) be viable, it has to be protected so that you can't just have one person be a subscriber and then that person can copy the stuff to the whole world. That's just a fact of life. Because people can't be trusted NOT to copy, there has to be some system to prevent it. Or at least prevent it for the "casual user" that won't go jump hoops to crack it. I think it was Steve Jobs who said "to keep the honest people honest".

The future will have DRM in the main-stream whether you like it or not. Of course you can always choose to get your media through some other channels, but if you think that "5 people" (obviously you didn't mean it literally) will be using DRM at the end of 2006, then you are seriously mistaken.

Peppe

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