"... John F. Kennedy Jr... Joseph Mercola and... the other social media users in the “Disinformation Dozen” include Ty and Charlene Bollinger, Sherri Tenpenny, Rizza Islam, Rashid Buttar, Erin Elizabeth, Sayer Ji, Kelly Brogan, Christiane Northrup, Ben Tapper, and Kevin Jenkins."
This is a terrible study. For one thing it lists Facebook, Instagram and Twitter but its own data says that while 73% of the bullshit on Facebook comes from their annointed 12, only 17% of it comes from them on Twitter and they didn't even publish results from Instagram. They have no numerical breakdowns on any of this. However, they give you little factoids like "The largest anti-vaccine Facebook Group now has 236,000 members" but make no mention of the fact that the biggest anti-vax jackass out there, Larry Cook, had 195,000 members in his Facebook group until he was deplatformed in November. This stuff is a problem? And social media's feet should be held to the fire? But this is every bit as unserious as a Mashable article can be. Numbers and metrics and results matter in stuff like this, not "we wrote this report to single out 20 people but we decided 12 was a catchier number."
I'm still happy to drag their names through the mud, because they deserve it. Maybe they are only part of the problem... but they are still part of the problem, and shining light into those dark corners is the only way to get these cockroaches to scurry.
I spent ten years neck-deep in this shit - Larry was someone my wife interacted with professionally multiple times a day. Misinformation should be dealt with as misinformation, not slandered using misinformation. This is witch hunting in the name of science and when the forces of good use the same pseudoscientific approach as the forces of evil they discredit everyone.