This is the human toll of misinformation.
 | By Alexandra Sifferlin Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
In September 2021, Amanda Makulec experienced a devastating tragedy when her nearly 3-month-old son died. Makulec, who is active on social media, decided to share the news on Twitter to avoid answering "how's your baby?" from online acquaintances. |
Then a stranger went through her old tweets and found confirmation that she had happily gotten vaccinated while pregnant. This person created an image showing her tweet about vaccination next to her tweet about losing her baby. "Safe … and effective" the person wrote, implying a connection. The image spread across the internet. This is despite the fact that her baby's death had nothing to do with vaccinations. |
"I did not expect the moment of my deepest grief and pain to be weaponized against pregnant women and vaccines that could protect them from the worst consequences of Covid-19," Makulec wrote in a guest essay this week about the experience. |
Makulec does not say this solely as a victim of misinformation and Covid-related online bullying, but as an active opponent of it. She is a public health professional who works in data visualization. She spends her time thinking about how to present Covid-19 information in a clear way. That's why she wanted to share her story to clarify for people that vaccines are safe and that she rejects how her grief was misappropriated in the service of anti-vaccine messaging. |
"In a time filled with unknowns, people seek explanations for why terrible things happen and also to assure themselves that one person's tragedy couldn't happen to them," writes Makulec. "But to do so with cruel disregard for the truth, as was done to my family, is an unacceptable new norm that's reinforced when people demand and share information without thinking about it critically." |
Every Opinion essay at The Times undergoes rigorous fact-checking as part of the editing process. This means that myself (the health and science editor) and a fact checker had to comb through tweets calling Makulec names like "murderer" and "dumbest mother ever," and see how they were shared. Deeply personal information had to be confirmed. This part of the process is not easy, but it's critical. Ultimately the only way to defeat lies is with the truth. |
Makulec's advice, as someone who both thinks about how people consume information and who has been the victim of the worst type of misinformation, is always to pause and assess before engaging and sharing. "Doing so might declutter our social feeds to make space for the truth and also save a bereaved family additional pain and suffering," she writes. |
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