Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Constant disseminator of disinformation, and self-declared liar and chaos agent Andy Wigmore tweeted an article recently saying, quote, “Researchers uncover MORE evidence that smokers may be protected from the deadly coronavirus”. The tweet points to an article in the Daily Mail, writing up a UCL literature review, aggregating results from 28 different studies looking into…

A few stories have been going around about a rumour rising on Twitter and other platforms that the Department of Health is behind a network of Twitter accounts posing as NHS staff. According to the BBC, the claims began on Twitter and quickly moved to Facebook. The BBC attempted to examine the Twitter fake accounts,…

One of the big stories this week, aside from what constitutes lockdown and, who can say what to whom on Twitter, is – disinformation. The Beeb, 538, Politico, Prospect, Daily Mail, Rolling Stone, Al Jeezy — all have run stories this week on disinformation and the corona crisis. Several of these were triggered by a…

There’s an old phenomenon in academic publishing that is taking on a new life and has become a huge source3 of disinformation in the Coronacrisis — preprints. Normally in academia, when a researcher comes up with a new theory, they’ll write it up and the paper itself will go through a peer review process. This…

There’s an image of a poster going around under this title, that is an entire COVID conspiracy story containing all the paranoia. First, the name is of course taken from Revelation Chap 13 Verse 16-18, which any good Bible-fearing person will remember tells us the number of the beast is Six hundred threescore and six.…

In an earlier blog post, we looked at the problem of comparing one country’s COVID figures with another. Although the public often uses these figures to gauge how bad things might be in their own country, it’s challenging to derive too much meaning from the figures. Each country is on its own trajectory, with the…

One area of the pandemic causing confusion revolves around children. Early in the pandemic, lots of folks promoted the notion that children don’t get COVID-19. Or, at least don’t suffer from it as badly. Or that they could get it, but they were only asymptomatic spreaders. So, as with most things, there was a great…

A very convincing piece of fake news is circulating about the NHS this week. Michelle Disraeli from Leeds tweeted that the UK government will be telling people by post how to acquire the contact tracing app, and then points out how easy it would be for a scammer to abuse the process. She then posts…

Meantime over on YouTube, a theory has been brewing that claims the COVID-19 figures are highly inflated, and simultaneously pushes for a reopening of the economy – the US economy, anyway. The claim is that physicians are being pressured to add COVID-19 to death certificates and diagnostic lists. And because of this, the claim is…

This week there’s one big coronavirus fake news story that has everyone’s attention. Where did COVID-19 come from? Usually when we chase down a fake news story, we can look to trusted sources — governments, foundations and news organisations — for the truth. But that doesn’t really work with this story. For example, Donald Trump…