Joe Rogan is a drop in the ocean of medical misinformation

Another week, another platform in trouble for allowing its talent to give voice to misinformation. This time, Joe Rogan suggested that the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are a type of “gene therapy” and that young people are at a greater risk from the shots than the disease, among other false and dubious health claims featured on his popular, Spotify-hosted podcast. The calls to remove his podcast have only intensified after revelations that he’s also repeatedly used a racist slur on the show, leading Spotify’s chief to apologise to the company’s employees.

The best outcome of the scandal wouldn’t be that Rogan was kicked off Spotify, at least not for the health bunk. It would be seeing his misleading Covid content in context: It’s just a tiny drop in the ocean of online health nonsense. Medical drivel has ballooned with the rise of streaming, e-commerce and social media platforms. Unlike the anti-vaccine pamphlets that skeptics handed out centuries ago, people spreading erroneous health advice today can near-instantly reach audiences of millions. The problem is so much bigger than Joe Rogan or Spotify. And platforms, lawmakers and regulators aren’t keeping up.

To get a sense of the scale, take a stroll down the giant virtual health aisles at Amazon, which has more than 200 million subscribers and millions more customers who shop without subscriptions. There, retailers hawk sedative drops, dopamine boosters and metabolism boosters, all of which possess only dubious evidence for efficacy for their marketed uses. One supplement maker seems to imply it can help HPV “vanish,” while another purports to “help cleanse and repair the liver.”

If you’d rather read harmful health gobbledygook, Amazon has plenty of books to choose from. You can study a two-week plan to “kill H.I.V.,” a vaccine “reappraisal” from a doctor who promotes homoeopathic medicine for childbirth, or “The Truth About Covid-19,” co-written by Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician whom researchers labelled the single-worst spreader of Covid misinformation.

Over at Netflix, Gwyneth Paltrow, a notorious peddler of dubious wellness claims, like the effectiveness of mediums, energy healing and “cold therapy,” shares her Goop Lab with the platform’s roughly 222 million subscribers. After Goop, you might watch a topsy-turvy nutrition documentary, like “What the Health,” which features such overstated claims as drinking milk can exacerbate cancer risks and eating an egg a day is as dangerous as smoking — one of the most dangerous human health habits. On Apple TV (and Amazon), you can bask in “The Magic Pill,” a documentary that touts a high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet as a salve for autism and cancer. Then we have the usual spaces for super-spreading falsehoods: Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. In the middle range of the available estimates, roughly 10 percent of Covid-related tweets and posts have been found to contain misinformation. The diversity of the false Covid claims circulating on social media is staggering. Bleach, cocaine and water have all been promoted as remedies — as have ineffective and potentially harmful medicines, like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

It’s clear that misinformation harms human health, stokes panic, wastes money and leads people to miss opportunities to pursue options that could have helped. But the new fire hose of bunk is also harming us in less obvious ways. It’s hitting our fractured societies — and, we believe, contributing to further polarisation.