Online harassment has become increasingly common for doctors during the pandemic, according to a physician researcher who studies misinformation.
When Dr. Natalia Solenkova woke up Monday morning, she was greeted with a flood of Twitter notifications on her phone. The Miami critical care physician had hundreds of new followers, and they, along with thousands of others on Twitter, were angry with her.
“cheap fake,” a term for a piece of fake media such as an image or video that takes little effort to produceSomeone had clumsily altered one of Solenkova’s posts to portray a blind, even deadly, zealotry for Covid vaccines and a vilification of anti-vaccine activists. “I purposefully didn’t spend a lot of time reading them, because I just wanted to find the original tweet and get it removed,” she said. “This time I didn’t come across death threats, but I’m not looking. I’ve probably blocked a thousand accounts.”
Online harassment has become increasingly common for doctors during the pandemic, according to Dr. Ali Neitzel, a physician researcher who“The targeting of individual physicians is a well-worn tactic,” Neitzel said. “But this cheaply-done fake — trying to frame a doctor who is doing unpaid advocacy work — that’s a new low.”
In an email sent Friday in response to an NBC News inquiry, Ramsey said he first came across the fake tweet on another website. “I respond to tweets I see on various message boards and newsgroups. If I learn that the tweet is not legitimate, or it is satire, I delete it,” he wrote. The tweet was deleted seconds later.
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