There's not much use in reading the comments on /r/HermanCainAward, but the submissions themselves can be quite enlightening (the ones tagged "awarded" or "nominated").<p>These follow the same general format: assorted social media posts from the subject over the course of the pandemic to the point they are hospitalized or killed by COVID, often followed by social media posts asking for help with medical bills or funeral expenses.<p>The social media posts are often reposting memes and agreeing with them. People are using these memes to help make medical decisions. Many seem convinced that by taking advice from memes instead their doctor, local or state departments of health, and similar that they are "doing their own research".<p>The first thing that surprised me was how weak many of these memes were. For example I've seen several were people seemed to be taking seriously as an anti-mask argument a meme about how underpants and pants can't stop people nearby from smelling your fart so why would you expect a mask to stop a virus?<p>I don't expect everyone to remember enough from their school days to remember that we sense odor by sensing individual molecules emitted by the source of odor, that these are often quite small (one of the major fart smell molecules just has 3 atoms), and that viruses are much larger (the smallest virus has almost 30k atoms, and the COVID-19 virus has about 6700x as many as that).<p>But I'd expect everyone, before deciding that a meme is a better info source than the doctor, health departments, etc., to do at least a little checking like Googling what causes farts to smell and Googling the COVID virus and then <i>seeing</i> that the former is a lot smaller, and so yes you should expect some difference in what it takes to filter them.<p>Furthermore, a lot of these people seem to have quite a few social media friends. So even if they fail to do all of the above I'd expect them to have at least one friend who either remembers how odors and viruses work or who looks it up and warns them that the meme is giving bad advice.<p>I knew social media exposes you to a lot more misinformation than you would normally get, but I had thought that for people with many social media friends that large friend group would somewhat counter that but that doesn't seem to be the case. For some reason it seems people's friend groups on social media are too homogenous, and so the same weak meme gets them all.<p>It's similar for most of the other memes common on these posts. Most are as flawed as the fart one, I would have expected a fair number of people to see the flaws immediately just from general knowledge from middle school or high school, and if not I'd have expected many to do the small amount of research to check it out, and for those who do neither I'd have expected some of the friends to do so and post. Seeing how far off my expectations were has been an eye opener.