There is a small chance that the poster is really a concerned physician who really enjoys posting to Anti-QAnon subreddits during their free time, but looking at the user’s posting history, I highly doubt it.
Began posting around March, posts often, and almost exclusively about the vaccine.
Claims to be a doctor/physician in a very large number of posts.
Gives out medical advice over the internet.
Gets wrong basic details, such as claiming that an mRNA vaccine contains proteins.
It is quite a coincidence that such a dramatic event occured to someone who spends such a large amount of time writing on reddit about the anti-vax.
I think that this is a character that someone made up.
The deleted comments from this account also show that in the past the user would “speak with doctors” instead of claiming to be one.
Possibly, but the benefit of the doubt argument is compelling. It’s difficult to understand for a certain demographic, the type that has been online constantly since the 1990s, that works in technology, etc… but some people are lurkers. They’ll read this stuff for years before they first comment, and then it will be about one thing exclusively.
And what might cause a doctor to begin posting in the last year or so? Are there any truly epic topics out there that would persuade them to drop the silence?
As for the “gets wrong basic details” I’ll have to take your word for it. But assuming that is true, I’ve never known real-life doctors to be like some tv show genius that never misses anything, that never confabulates or gets confused. They work in an environment where that’s much less deadly than it sounds because there’s a checklist culture and a half dozen other people catching their slipups. So of course once they posted on a forum without that backup, there’d be little mistakes.
It is quite a coincidence that such a dramatic event occured to someone who spends such a large amount of time writing on reddit about the anti-vax.
It’s not a coincidence at all. Just means they were near the breaking point for awhile now, and they finally tipped over. March was “bad enough I need to vent” and this week was “so bad I can’t go on”. These things are related, not “correlated without any plausible mechanism of causation”.
There is a small chance that the poster is really a concerned physician who really enjoys posting to Anti-QAnon subreddits during their free time, but looking at the user’s posting history, I highly doubt it.
I think that this is a character that someone made up.
The deleted comments from this account also show that in the past the user would “speak with doctors” instead of claiming to be one.
https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/#{"author":"thanosrain","resultSize":100}
Possibly, but the benefit of the doubt argument is compelling. It’s difficult to understand for a certain demographic, the type that has been online constantly since the 1990s, that works in technology, etc… but some people are lurkers. They’ll read this stuff for years before they first comment, and then it will be about one thing exclusively.
And what might cause a doctor to begin posting in the last year or so? Are there any truly epic topics out there that would persuade them to drop the silence?
As for the “gets wrong basic details” I’ll have to take your word for it. But assuming that is true, I’ve never known real-life doctors to be like some tv show genius that never misses anything, that never confabulates or gets confused. They work in an environment where that’s much less deadly than it sounds because there’s a checklist culture and a half dozen other people catching their slipups. So of course once they posted on a forum without that backup, there’d be little mistakes.
It’s not a coincidence at all. Just means they were near the breaking point for awhile now, and they finally tipped over. March was “bad enough I need to vent” and this week was “so bad I can’t go on”. These things are related, not “correlated without any plausible mechanism of causation”.