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The Cesspool Effect — 7 Comments

  1. Here Here!  But FB is the internet and if you cannot believe your newsfeed, what can you do?

    • Welcome Topgold! The Internet is akin to the entire population getting their entire reading material from just one newspaper without realising that that newspaper has no editorial staff or researchers.  Headlines like "Study Finds That Drinking Milk Will Cause Your Head To Explode" are guaranteed tens of thousands of views, with most readers religiously believing such nonsense.

  2. Facebook, twitter, media – the lot of them! Did you see that in the latest statistics from Smoking in England that the majority of smokers now believe ecigs are worse than cigarettes?

    • "Smoking in England" is of course funded by the DoH and CRUK so I would treat their statistics with a slight touch of caution.  However there is no doubt that the obfuscations, distortions and downright lies put out by the Anti-Smokers are doing enormous damage to the e-cig industry.  But I don't have to tell you that!  😉
       

  3. Thank you for another great ramble Irish Grandad. It seems as if the whole world has stopped using reason when it comes to passing these piles of misinformation around. Shoddy work by the press is bad, but social media passing it around is far worse. It's like an infectious disease that transfers stupidity by sight. When my friends post them, I can at least comment with links to actual and valid scientific studies but unfortunately that only helps a few people at a time.

    • Thank you and welcome!  Unfortunately there is little can be done about posting rubbish on the Interweb [I know – I do it here all the time!].  Maybe the best tctic is to dream up alarming headlines and post them on Farcebook ourselves?  😈 

  4. 'Twas ever thus, GD. The anti-smoking lobby have relied on the fact that they can issue a press release which is demonstrably risible twaddle safe in the knowledge that the headline will have been made. It matters not that the 'fact' is subsequently disproved – the headline is what people will take with them, and through repetition will become fact. It's an old propaganda trick that was used with great success by Goebbels.

    “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

    Joseph Goebbels – Hitler's Propaganda Minister

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