There Are No Girls on the Internet - April 23, 2021


DISINFORMED： Instagram wellness ＂experts” are spewing yoga infused BS about miscarriages and vaccines

DISINFORMED： Boys are being radicalized by sexist, racist online networks and she went undercover to expose them DISINFORMED We’re wrong about trafficking w⧸ Michael Hobbes

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

166.13

Word count

2,247

Sentence count

124

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.520 Guaranteed human.
00:00:04.100 The new Red Bull Dragonberry and Tropicberry Energizers,
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00:00:43.740 welcome home pro society is a weekly podcast that's part book club part group chat for anyone
00:00:49.960 who thinks pride and prejudice and love island to serve the same level of discourse each week
00:00:54.500 we're connecting the dots between books the internet and pop culture with your favorite
00:00:58.520 writers book talk creators and plenty of overthought opinions listen to pro society
00:01:05.240 on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts i survived nine months in
00:01:12.540 captivity and i've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed
00:01:17.900 them i'm elizabeth smart and these are the survivor files every week i'm with survivors
00:01:24.200 who lived through the unthinkable,
00:01:26.160 abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:30.000 These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:33.840 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart
00:01:36.600 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
00:01:39.620 or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:41.720 Just a heads up, this episode mentions miscarriage.
00:01:47.680 You're listening to Disinformed,
00:01:49.600 a miniseries from There Are No Girls on the Internet.
00:01:52.600 I'm Bridget Todd.
00:01:54.200 So like many women, I've experienced a miscarriage,
00:02:00.120 and it was one of the hardest, most painful experiences of my entire life.
00:02:03.840 That's why I'm so deeply disturbed by the latest COVID vaccine misinformation
00:02:07.400 floating around corners of the mommy internet.
00:02:10.380 So-called wellness gurus and Momstagram influencers
00:02:13.080 are using their social media platforms to spread fears that getting a COVID vaccine
00:02:17.240 or even just being around someone who has gotten a vaccine can cause a miscarriage.
00:02:22.220 So to be clear, I am not a doctor,
00:02:24.660 so this episode is really me parroting information from actual doctors.
00:02:28.860 The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has endorsed vaccination during pregnancy
00:02:33.320 based on evidence it's been evaluating for over a year.
00:02:36.580 Everyone, including pregnant women and those seeking to become pregnant,
00:02:39.900 should get a COVID-19 vaccine.
00:02:41.900 The vaccines are safe and effective, the society said in a statement.
00:02:44.740 And the preliminary results of one of the largest reports on COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy
00:02:49.240 bolsters evidence that it's safe to get vaccinated,
00:02:52.360 although the authors of the report say more comprehensive research is needed.
00:02:56.640 So that's the facts, but here's where things get murky. 0.99
00:03:00.140 Dr. Jen Gunter, an OBGYN and one of my favorite slayers of medical misinformation,
00:03:05.040 said that a lot of people were contacting or reporting heavier periods than usual
00:03:08.440 after having gotten the COVID vaccine.
00:03:10.580 She wrote an entire blog post about it, which you should definitely read.
00:03:13.200 You can find it in the show description.
00:03:15.920 She writes,
00:03:17.040 This was first formally covered in The Lily,
00:03:19.400 and the article points it out that the impact on vaccines on menstruation
00:03:22.320 isn't typically tracked in studies.
00:03:24.640 Bleeding that is heavy enough to require a trip to the emergency room
00:03:27.340 would be picked up by most vaccine studies,
00:03:30.060 but not an early period or breakthrough bleeding
00:03:32.280 or a heavy period or a more painful one.
00:03:34.600 This lack of information is maddening,
00:03:37.080 not because I think there's something harmful happening to the uterus post-vaccination,
00:03:41.040 but because this is something that we should understand.
00:03:43.440 And people like to be warned of side effects in advance.
00:03:45.760 For example, I warn my patients that steroid injections can cause a regular period so that if it happens, my patients are not surprised.
00:03:53.620 Now, in this post, Dr. Gunter lays out all the possible reasons why a vaccine might impact somebody's period, including the possibility that there is no link at all.
00:04:02.480 Basically, Dr. Gunter says that until there is more research around how COVID might impact somebody's period, we won't actually know for sure.
00:04:09.640 So why haven't doctors been collecting this kind of data?
00:04:13.080 Well, it's kind of because the impact of vaccines on menstruation has not been deemed worth studying
00:04:18.640 by our medical field that is so often dominated by men studying male bodies.
00:04:23.160 But in the absence of actual information, a slew of self-proclaimed health, wellness, and spirituality experts on Instagram
00:04:30.140 have stepped in to fill that gap with bad misinformation.
00:04:34.660 Even worse, many of them are spreading the idea that just coming into contact with someone who has been vaccinated,
00:04:40.940 even if you have not gotten the vaccine yourself,
00:04:43.300 can cause menstrual issues or miscarriage.
00:04:46.160 I actually don't want to name names here
00:04:48.040 because honestly, I don't want these accounts
00:04:49.600 getting more attention and traction.
00:04:51.360 But whatever you're conjuring up in your head 1.00
00:04:53.220 about the kind of women who run these accounts 1.00
00:04:54.720 is probably accurate.
00:04:56.480 And I say this as someone who is interested
00:04:57.820 in a fair amount of woo-woo spirituality stuff,
00:05:00.980 which you can definitely ask me about
00:05:02.100 because I love talking about.
00:05:03.900 These accounts use the guise of wellness and spirituality
00:05:06.420 to mask the fact that they're actually spreading
00:05:08.520 potentially dangerous health misinformation.
00:05:11.320 Many of them are just repackaging good old-fashioned conspiracy theories,
00:05:15.240 like that you shouldn't trust public health officials
00:05:17.020 or that vaccines are really about programming Americans
00:05:19.680 and dressing them up in hippy-dippy yoga chic.
00:05:23.680 One self-proclaimed health and medical freedom enthusiast
00:05:27.100 shared with her more than 64,000 followers 0.65
00:05:30.480 that many women are, quote,
00:05:32.100 catching menstrual irregularities or miscarriages
00:05:34.620 from being around the recently vaccinated.
00:05:37.220 And to their credit, Instagram added a fact check
00:05:39.820 to a viral video with almost half a million views
00:05:42.300 from a so-called wellness expert,
00:05:45.040 warning that women are miscarrying
00:05:46.440 just from being around people who have been vaccinated.
00:05:49.380 So when we actually unpack this,
00:05:51.960 it shows us so much about how bad medical information
00:05:54.500 travels online.
00:05:56.000 So disinformation is when someone intentionally spreads
00:05:58.620 untrue information purposely to mislead people.
00:06:01.560 They know what they're saying isn't true,
00:06:03.040 but they want to cause confusion and chaos.
00:06:05.400 But misinformation is when someone spreads something
00:06:08.540 that isn't true and they don't even realize what they're spreading isn't true. It's unintentional
00:06:13.540 and it may even be well-intentioned. Now I suspect that some of the women spreading bad information 1.00
00:06:19.100 are doing so because they're worried. They don't know if there's actually truth to the idea that 1.00
00:06:23.500 being around someone who's been vaccinated can cause a miscarriage. And they're probably thinking
00:06:27.560 that it's better safe than sorry to share what they've heard with their followers. But people
00:06:31.900 deserve accurate information about their health and self-styled Instagram healers can cause a
00:06:36.540 dangerous situation if they're amplifying untrue health data. It's also hard because, like I said
00:06:41.420 earlier, the medical field tends to understudy women and our bodies and our issues. Case in point, 1.00
00:06:46.800 it's important for doctors to know if a fever is a symptom of vaccination. But they've deemed it
00:06:51.660 less important to study that same vaccine's impact on menstruation. If you're used to medical issues
00:06:56.840 that impact you being ignored, as so many of us women are, it makes complete sense that people
00:07:01.780 would use whatever platform they have to start the conversation.
00:07:04.960 I get it. I really do.
00:07:07.260 But on the flip side, the land of wellness Instagram influencers
00:07:10.100 is not always that well-intentioned.
00:07:12.640 Some people who call themselves experts
00:07:15.300 may very well be pushing COVID vaccine disinformation
00:07:18.380 to intentionally cash in.
00:07:20.700 If you listen to the episode of Disinform with Ifoma Izoma,
00:07:23.980 the former public policy lead at Pinterest
00:07:25.740 who worked to curb health misinformation on the platform,
00:07:28.840 she says that the majority of the time
00:07:30.380 when someone is pushing bunk medical information on Pinterest,
00:07:33.480 it was because they were selling something,
00:07:35.500 supplements or essential oils,
00:07:37.400 something that they were pushing as a natural cure
00:07:39.620 to an actual medical problem.
00:07:41.840 Here's a clip.
00:07:43.060 A point that I made often,
00:07:45.320 because I'd get invited by the WHO, CDC, and others
00:07:49.060 to talk about this health misinformation work,
00:07:51.980 that they had not thought about as much
00:07:55.600 is the financial incentives
00:07:56.920 that are tied to a lot of misinformation.
00:07:58.940 mission uh whether it's alex jones selling his nonsense t-shirts and supplements and whatever
00:08:04.740 else these people are scam artists that's their number their number one job is scamming folks
00:08:09.960 they use the values that people have they use the fears that people have to then sell their
00:08:16.700 products but at the end of the day these are spammers and scammers and so you need to also
00:08:22.660 be looking at what it is that they're trying to push on your platform. For almost every single
00:08:28.980 health misinformation site, they were selling supplements. So if you would address dangerous
00:08:35.260 supplements on the platform as spam, why would you not consider this at the same level of harm
00:08:42.560 to the platform and ultimately harm to legitimate advertisers? I think that we're so used to
00:08:48.800 thinking about scammers as people selling fake Gucci on the street. And no, people can scam
00:08:56.460 online and they're misleading you in order to get you to buy whatever bullshit product they're 0.99
00:09:01.840 hawking. I would actually argue that the person selling the Gucci handbag that's fake, that's not 0.96
00:09:08.020 harmful. You get a cheaper bag. If it's made well, it looks pretty good. You get a deal,
00:09:14.120 they get a deal Gucci doesn't get a deal but what do they need one for um but that's not harmful
00:09:20.900 in the same way that telling parents and especially at the point at which most parents make decisions
00:09:27.080 about vaccines uh in the last trimester before they have the kid that they instead of getting
00:09:34.640 a vaccine for their child which will save their child's life they should instead go buy your
00:09:39.940 vitamin K supplement, that is so harmful and dangerous in a way that we need to take it more
00:09:46.700 seriously. It's not a difference of opinion. It's actually costing people's lives.
00:09:51.800 And I have to say, at least one of the spiritual mom influencers I've mentioned in this episode
00:09:56.560 is currently selling spirituality workshops on how to tap into your motherly intuition
00:10:01.600 and heal your womb for the low, low cost of anywhere from $100 to $333.
00:10:08.360 And this is what really pisses me off. 0.99
00:10:11.900 Women are already shamed for speaking up about our miscarriages, our periods, our pain, and our bodies.
00:10:17.560 And the medical field often ignores us when we do.
00:10:21.220 And people are capitalizing on this culture of stigma and shame.
00:10:25.260 To make themselves richer at the expense of women who are just trying to sort out who they can turn to for trustworthy health information.
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00:10:52.100 Disinformed is brought to you by There Are No Girls on the Internet.
00:10:54.820 It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.
00:10:57.700 Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.
00:10:59.840 Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer.
00:11:02.820 Michael Amato is our contributing producer.
00:11:05.100 I'm your host, Bridget Todd.
00:11:06.160 For more great podcasts, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:11:36.160 through the unthinkable. Abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are
00:11:41.760 stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart
00:11:47.900 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:11:53.080 If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality,
00:11:57.260 welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for
00:12:02.820 anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:12:07.140 Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your
00:12:11.360 favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm
00:12:16.560 obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
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