One of the things that struck me about the covid madness was just how many people got sucked into it even before March of 2020. This never made sense to me, but one of the books I've just read, The Hype Machines by Sinan Aral, might accidentally provide an answer to this. Over the course of 2019, the major tech companies started taking steps to shut down "anti-vaccine" content on the internet. This included anything that would encourage people to decline to take vaccines. Content such as "the flu is not actually all that dangerous to most healthy people."
Since the best arguments for covid not being dangerous is to look at the flu and say the flu is not really that dangerous to most people, even before covid specific censorship started, Big Tech was removing the ability of most people to get one side of the story on how dangerous the virus was. Since most people get most of their news from the internet, and a huge fraction of that either passes through or tries to make it onto the Big Tech platforms, that means that right from the start efforts to amp panic would spread easier than efforts to tone it down.
Crucially, however, this also seems to neatly explain the odd assortment of people I know who saw through the madness from the start: in my personal experience, there is a near perfect correlation between not using social media (defined as algorithmic websites) and seeing through the madness at the start. Things got more complicated later, but it is suspicious, and it provides a possible explanation for why so many people would go insane all at once.
Social Media Censorship as Cause of the Covid Madness
Since the best arguments for covid not being dangerous is to look at the flu and say the flu is not really that dangerous to most people, even before covid specific censorship started, Big Tech was removing the ability of most people to get one side of the story on how dangerous the virus was. Since most people get most of their news from the internet, and a huge fraction of that either passes through or tries to make it onto the Big Tech platforms, that means that right from the start efforts to amp panic would spread easier than efforts to tone it down.
Crucially, however, this also seems to neatly explain the odd assortment of people I know who saw through the madness from the start: in my personal experience, there is a near perfect correlation between not using social media (defined as algorithmic websites) and seeing through the madness at the start. Things got more complicated later, but it is suspicious, and it provides a possible explanation for why so many people would go insane all at once.