Sorting falsehoods from facts
"Health misinformation and disinformation have always been with us. It's nothing new," says Kasisomayajula Viswanath, Lee Kum Kee professor of health communication at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "We had snake-oil salesmen when advertising began. But what's different this time around is the scale." Both mass media and social media are allowing bad information to reach large swaths of people quickly, making it difficult for many people to differentiate the good from the bad.
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