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The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control is considering quitting Elon Musk’s social media platform X, its director said Tuesday.
Speaking at POLITICO’s Health Care Summit in Brussels, ECDC Director Pamela Rendi-Wagner said social media is a “breeding ground for mis- and disinformation.”
“Twitter, or X, is now in every newspaper. Everybody is leaving X, and maybe for good reasons. We are discussing this as well at ECDC at the moment,” she said.
“Everybody does, why shouldn’t we,” she added.
Speaking about scientific misinformation on social media, Rendi-Wagner said that trust in institutions was lost during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“When people don’t understand scientific evidence-based messages, they get scared and turn to other sources of information,” she said, adding that for these reasons the agency is working on avoiding scientific language in their reports.
“We have entered a new time,” she said, and added that scientific institutions must find new ways of advising people what to do for their well-being.
“We cannot just have the warning index finger and say ‘you must do this,’ because people don’t want that,” she said.
“I think we should find new ways of motivating them in a positive way to take the right decisions for themselves, their families and their communities,” she added.
However, “I think we cannot only say social media is bad, because we should take advantage of social media [to] engage also with the communities and the people,” she said.
