OT: was: Re: YouTube proving fertile ground for anti-vaccination campaigners

[Guest guest]

You tube is also a breeding ground for some hilarious stuff. If

anyone needs a laugh it's us. Watch this:

> YouTube proving fertile ground for anti-vaccination campaigners

>

> Dec 4, 2007

>

http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5iVL8_L-Hff3bNhErs75Adr-5URmg

>

> TORONTO - It may be better known as the place to go to watch a drunken

> Hasselhoff eating a hamburger, but the video website YouTube has

> also become a popular and effective soapbox for people who believe

> vaccinations are harmful, a new scientific review reveals.

>

> And public health authorities need to come to grips with the potential

> impact YouTube, Facebook and the whole Internet-based

> social-networking phenomenon could have on policies like universal

> vaccinations, suggested the authors, researchers from the University

> of Toronto and York University.

>

> Senior author Dr. Kumanan said he calls the approach

> " anti-vaccination 2.0 " - a play on the term Web 2.0.

>

> " This is their new strategy for communicating, " said , an

> internal medicine specialist and a public health policy researcher.

>

> " These people believe their viewpoint is not being aired in public.

> They believe that they are being shut out of the discourse and they

> want to get their viewpoint out. And this is their way of creating

> commercials for their viewpoints.

>

> " And they're putting a lot of effort into it. And other people ...

> just from the view counts and the ratings, are coming on and wanting

> to find out more about these viewpoints. Their videos are being viewed

> and rated highly. "

>

> The findings were published Wednesday as a research letter in the

> Journal of the American Medical Association.

>

> and lead author Keelan have been collaborating for

> several years on work aimed at understanding the anti-vaccination

> movement.

>

> When YouTube hit the web and started generating buzz, Keelan wanted to

> see if vaccine opponents had recognized it as a unguarded portal to

> the world's Internet users. They had.

>

> Among the offerings were documentary-type videos capturing the views

> of parents of autistic children who blame particular vaccines or

> thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative formerly used in vaccine

> manufacture, for the autism. (Thimerosal is still used in the

> manufacture of flu vaccine for children.)

>

> " It's the perfect venue for an anecdote, both positive or negative, "

> Keelan said in an interview.

>

> " And while it's certainly not the communications structure trained

> public health professionals would think to use, anecdotes - we know

> from research - are incredibly powerful at conveying information about

> risk. And they're also incredibly persuasive. "

>

> For this study, the authors searched YouTube for videos on

> " immunization " or " vaccination " on Feb. 20, 2007, roughly a year after

> the website was launched. They found 153. (On Tuesday, those same

> search terms brought up 1,668 hits.)

>

> Of that total, 73 were pro-immunization, 49 were anti-vaccination and

> 31 were deemed " ambiguous. " When the researchers looked at view counts

> and ratings, the videos with the anti-vaccination messages were

> watched more often and were rated more highly by viewers.

>

> " We were startled by our findings, " admitted Keelan, an assistant

> professor of public health sciences at the University of Toronto.

>

> " We were expecting to see maybe some difference between the way

> viewers saw the negative videos versus the positive videos. But we

> weren't expecting it to be so significant. "

>

> Janis Whitlock, a researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.,

> has been studying Internet message boards to see what role they might

> play in spreading information about self-injury. Whitlock, who

> recently shifted her attention to YouTube, agreed the medium is a

> powerful one.

>

> " YouTube has become ... the new message board. And it's so much more

> powerful - at least for the self-injury stuff, " she said. " You

> combined with the text these images and music ... phew... and it's

> very intense. "

>

> The authors and Whitlock said public health is going to have to come

> to grips with this medium of information dissemination.

>

> " It spreads. It spreads emotions. It spreads ideas. It spreads

> methods. It spreads means. It spreads reasons, " said Whitlock, a

> professor with Cornell's Family Life Development Center.

>

> " And we can't ignore ... that it's the dissemination of information,

> for ill or for good. "

>

> acknowledged that in the past some vaccine advocates didn't

> like to address the claims of opponents, assuming any discussion of

> what was seen as views from the fringe was counterproductive. But the

> Web 2.0 universe requires a new strategy, he suggested.

>

> " In the past that could work, but it's not going to work anymore. You

> could ignore it and not discuss it and perhaps it would eventually

> peter out. But now there are ways for people with these viewpoints to

> communicate with each other, " he said.

>

> " These sites are now providing people with a mechanism by which they

> can bypass the conventional filters and get their messages out. It can

> be dangerous. The Internet is valueless in that respect. "

>