[nonwifehaver3]

When I saw the title, I was expecting an article about how we need to: educate citizens ahead of time about the different ways that disease can spread ensuring they don't fall prey to misinformation, fund more research for monitoring and mitigation, invest in stuff like "you need to let your employees work from home if there's a pandemic if possible, you need to emphasize to healthcare and transportation workers that in an emergency they are going to be needed the way that soldiers are needed in wartime and pay them extra".

But, it's just another demand for everyone to build a permanent apparatus to censor every communication that doesn't come from a very official and accurate source such as the publisher or the author's employer. This line of thinking is basically saying that democracy is a failure -- that most people are a bunch of easily deluded simpletons who have to be herded around for their own good, and they can't even learn ahead of time what they might need to know in a pandemic. Maybe that's part of the answer to a very important question behind all this, which is "why are people losing trust in society's most basic institutions, even when they're right?"

[Someone]

”and they can't even learn ahead of time what they might need to know in a pandemic.”

They can, but why would they? The power of society is that we work together. You don’t need to know how to grow wheat, bake bread, or herd cows anymore, either, but that doesn’t make us simpletons.

[nonwifehaver3]

I looked into some recent disease-related misinformation (re Zika) and honestly it would be hard for many people to look at it and immediately say why it was wrong (it was extremely wrong). It wasn't like "putting Vaseline under your nose stops you from getting the flu". So I don't think people can really be prepared for everything ahead of time & there has to be some authority.

I still think that the key problem is that people distrust health and government institutions, not that they're allowed (for now) to post quackery or misinformation. I don't really understand how one gets that way. There are perceptions that public health institutions are politicized. Maybe they've never been friends with a doctor or a health official. Maybe their trust has been broken re health or even some other part of government. You can delete someone's posts pretty easily, but you can't force someone to trust the CDC or whoever. It needs to be built over time.