My 6-Year-Old Son Died. Then the Anti-vaxxers Found Out
My 6-year-old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition.
But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son’s death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.”
I’ve now received thousands of harassing posts. Some people emailed me at work.
To them, what happened to my son was not a tragedy. It was karma for suckered parents like me.
Although some abusive posts showed up on my public Facebook page, the problem started on Twitter—whose new CEO, Elon Musk, gutted the platform’s content-moderation team after taking over.
Accompanying the obituary was a picture of him showing off his new University of North Carolina basketball jersey. Strangers swiped the photo from Twitter and wrote vile things on it. They’d mined my tweets, especially ones where I had written about the public-health benefits of vaccination. Someone needed to make me pay for vaccinating my child, one person insinuated. Another said my other children would be next if they were vaccinated too.
A blogger mocked me for fleeing social media. Commenters joined in. My grief, their content. “Your one job as a parent was to protect your children,” wrote one person. “You failed miserably.”
I’m not the only parent being harassed in this way. Some of the trolls posted photos of other children, insinuating that they had died because of COVID vaccines. I feel for the grieving mothers and fathers who receive those messages.
My friends and I reported some of the worst posts to Facebook and Twitter. A few users were booted from Twitter. But in most cases, we got no response; in a few, we received tepid form messages.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...nt/673537/
My 6-year-old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition.
But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son’s death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.”
I’ve now received thousands of harassing posts. Some people emailed me at work.
To them, what happened to my son was not a tragedy. It was karma for suckered parents like me.
Although some abusive posts showed up on my public Facebook page, the problem started on Twitter—whose new CEO, Elon Musk, gutted the platform’s content-moderation team after taking over.
Accompanying the obituary was a picture of him showing off his new University of North Carolina basketball jersey. Strangers swiped the photo from Twitter and wrote vile things on it. They’d mined my tweets, especially ones where I had written about the public-health benefits of vaccination. Someone needed to make me pay for vaccinating my child, one person insinuated. Another said my other children would be next if they were vaccinated too.
A blogger mocked me for fleeing social media. Commenters joined in. My grief, their content. “Your one job as a parent was to protect your children,” wrote one person. “You failed miserably.”
I’m not the only parent being harassed in this way. Some of the trolls posted photos of other children, insinuating that they had died because of COVID vaccines. I feel for the grieving mothers and fathers who receive those messages.
My friends and I reported some of the worst posts to Facebook and Twitter. A few users were booted from Twitter. But in most cases, we got no response; in a few, we received tepid form messages.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...nt/673537/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
