What Does “Trust in Media” Even Mean?
On Substack and what constitutes trustworthy behavior
The Washington Post published a story a couple of days ago about the fact that Joseph Mercola, who is perhaps the number one purveyor of anti-vaccination disinformation in America (though maybe a little less known to mainstream pro-vaccination people than Robert Kennedy Jr.) has recently found a platform for disseminating his dangerous propaganda, and it is the newsletter platform Substack, where he is among the top 20 most popular writers in the “political” category.**
This is not terribly surprising since Substack has not shied away from content that’s been embraced by the right wing, and anti-vax content increasingly fits the bill. (A few prominent writers on the left have decamped elsewhere as a result.)
The anti-vax movement was at one point a fringe movement you could point to as an extreme that existed at both ends of a political spectrum but in the wake of the covid pandemic and the demonization of vaccines and preventative covid measures by Republicans under the Trump administration for political ends, anti-vaccine resistance is overwhelmingly more prevalent on the right. So now Substack has to deal with the problem of what to do with this content, which is very, very popular on their platform.
