Calling it "blaming society" makes this pretty funny, like when Manson did it and the kid in the Suicidal Tendencies song does it when his mom won't bring him a Pepsi.<p>Facebook's self-serving algorithms are of course a scourge in this area, but he does have a point. Part of why the messaging on COVID has been so fucked is because of this very thing: spinning or tweaking the truth. Facebook does it, to increase engagement, but public officials and others also do it. People who should've just told the simple truth, instead tried to gauge our response to it, and spun and tweaked the truth in an effort to "game" the response. Just tell the truth. Because you're probably underestimating the general public, as usual, and will ultimately end up increasing the danger and impact, by two mechanisms: 1) people have incomplete or incorrect or insufficient information to act on, and/or 2) certain people (who are adults and can tell when someone is dissembling, or communicating manipulatively, a.k.a. propagandizing) start to distrust the "official story," and the cumulative effect is that they go looking for "the real truth" in all kinds of wacky out-of-the-way places and get all conspiracy-minded, and the Facebooks of the world pick up on this and amplify it in their feeds. You want to combat this? Give them an authoritative, trustworthy source. Tell them the whole, unvarnished truth. Gauging the response, communicating to achieve a goal, well that's not informing, that's either sales or propaganda. You want to combat disinformation, start with <i>information</i> - all of it, without spin, without censorship.<p>Seemingly every disaster movie has a character who refuses to sound a warning because they don't want to start a panic, but then they ultimately cause greater loss of life or whatnot. That character is always a villain. We hate them precisely because their communication or lack thereof, has an agenda that underestimates us and ultimately ends up costing us.