Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence

Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence

Award-winning medical journalist Deborah Cohen joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss her book Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health. [https://bookshop.org/a/52607/9780861549887] Deborah examines how social media algorithms, influencers, podcasts, wellness brands, and AI tools have transformed the way people find and evaluate health information. She argues that online platforms reward certainty, emotion, and personal storytelling over scientific nuance, while commercial incentives increasingly shape what health advice reaches the public. The conversation explores the erosion of trust in traditional institutions, the rise of health influencers and wellness marketing, the promises and pitfalls of patient empowerment, the quantified-self movement, GLP-1 drugs, and the growing role of AI in medicine. Throughout, Cohen emphasizes the challenge of navigating a digital health ecosystem where expertise competes with attention, commercial interests, and algorithmic amplification, leaving patients to determine whom—and what—to trust. Deborah Cohen: > Obviously, you want to sell newspapers — if you’re a mainstream media, you want to get eyeballs on the screens. But this is all monetized on social media. So if you have a video that goes viral, you potentially stand to gain financially. Also, a lot of influencers work with companies for product placement, to advertise products. And there’s a massive market in healthcare. So there was one study that suggested — and this is a couple of years old, it’s a US study — that there’s over 3 million health providers on TikTok alone. So, We’re getting our information from people very much with a commercial incentive to sell. VIDEO ON YOUTUBE: The post Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence [https://plutopia.io/deborah-cohen-bad-influence/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Patient Power in the Age of AI

Three longtime patient-empowerment advocates — e-Patient Dave deBronkart, Hugo Campos, and Gilles Frydman — join Plutopia to discuss how AI is transforming participatory medicine by giving patients new tools to understand medical research, manage personal health data, challenge institutional failures, and act with greater agency. They explore the promise and risks of large language models in healthcare, including hallucinated scientific references, poor interoperability, rare-disease knowledge gaps, and the need for patient-directed AI rather than institution-controlled systems. The conversation frames AI not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a cognitive aid that can help patients, caregivers, and communities ask better questions, validate information, and regain power in a broken healthcare system. Gilles Frydman: > How do we find ways to? Help people who are not trained as scientists to get the latest scientific information so that they can get the best care in case they get diagnosed with serious stuff. Hugo Campos: > How much agency do I have, and how much agency? does AI give me? And I put AI in these two different categories that tend to be opposing in terms of agency, which are what I’ve been calling institutional. AI versus patient directed AI. Dave deBronkart: > My best talks have been entirely about the trajectory of empowerment. Not specific to healthcare, but empowerment in general through the last half century and how access to information alters that. LINKS * Society for Participatory Medicine [https://participatorymedicine.org] * Collaborative Healthcare Action Measurement Platform (CHAMP) [https://participatorymedicine.org/champ/] * Gilles Frydman at LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillesfrydman/] * Critical AI Health Literacy as Liberation Technology: A New Skill for Patient Empowerment [https://nam.edu/perspectives/critical-ai-health-literacy-as-liberation-technology-a-new-skill-for-patient-empowerment/] by Hugo Campos and Liz Salmi * e-Patient Dave: Democratizing Healthcare [https://www.epatientdave.com/] * Patients Use AI (Substack) [https://patientsuseai.substack.com/] VIDEO FROM OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL: The post Patient Power in the Age of AI [https://plutopia.io/patient-power-in-the-age-of-ai/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Plutopia Tribal Chat

In this hosts-only “Plutopians Gone Wild” episode, Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman range freely across early online culture, disaster response, politics, surveillance, AI, advertising, podcasts, and pop culture. They reflect on the early internet’s topic-centered communities, The WELL, AOL, Genie, ham radio, and the cooperative spirit that emerged during crises like the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Southeast Asian tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina, contrasting that with today’s tech-bro bunker mentality and surveillance economy. The conversation moves through Flock license plate readers, Ring doorbells, AI-generated video captions, offshore Chinese data centers, Texas precinct organizing, robocalls, streaming ads, listener-supported media, and podcast sponsorships before veering into favorite shows and films, including Decoding the Gurus, The White Canon, The X-Files, Dune, Star Trek, Nope, and Project Hail Mary. The episode works as a loose, funny, and occasionally cranky Plutopia roundtable about how technology, media, politics, and culture have changed since the dial-up days—and whether any of it still leaves room for community, trust, and good conversation. The post Plutopia Tribal Chat [https://plutopia.io/plutopia-tribal-chat/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Cindy Cohn: Privacy’s Defender

Cindy Cohn joins Plutopia to discuss her new book, Privacy’s Defender, [https://bookshop.org/a/52607/9780262051248] and reflects on her decades of work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, [https://www.eff.org/] from the landmark Bernstein encryption case [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States] to fights against NSA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency] mass surveillance and national security letters. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter#Contentious_aspects] She argues that privacy limits the power of governments, corporations, and individuals, and that winning the battle to free encryption was one of the most important victories for digital civil liberties because it made modern secure communication and online commerce possible. The conversation expands into current threats, including ChatGPT data access by law enforcement, border device searches, Palantir and ICE surveillance, license plate readers, age verification laws, attacks on journalists, and the erosion of legal remedies for rights violations. Cohn emphasizes that technology is always a mixed bag, that social problems cannot simply be solved by blunt internet regulation, and that organizations like EFF help “stress test” proposed solutions to make sure they do not undermine free expression, privacy, or vulnerable communities. She also discusses her upcoming departure from EFF, praises incoming executive director Nicole Ozer, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Ozer] and says she hopes to return more directly to legal and civil-liberties battles as a “warrior lawyer.” Cindy Cohn: > When I look back on my career and I thought about, what are the things that I’ve done that have affected or helped the most people, I just don’t think anything comes close to freeing up encryption in terms of the impact. But also, as I mentioned, it’s not just about me. I’m very happy to tell the story. It was really fun to get to do that, but it’s a story about kind of a ragtag group of hackers and activists who bound together, and lo and behold, we won. I mean, that’s a narrative that is important for people to remember, even as I then did tell two other stories in the book where the win wasn’t so clean. I think all of those stories are important for people thinking about how can we make the world better today. You know, sometimes you get clean wins and sometimes you get messier situations, but the fights are always worth it. Support EFF [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/EFF_Logo.svg/330px-EFF_Logo.svg.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=index&utm_content=thumbnail&_=20100613063408]https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff CLICK THIS LOGO TO SUPPORT THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION [https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff] https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff “When you go online, your rights go with you.” The post Cindy Cohn: Privacy’s Defender [https://plutopia.io/cindy-cohn-privacys-defender/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

David Miles: The Viral Sneeze

David Miles discusses his book Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold [https://bookshop.org/a/52607/9798217253272], arguing that “the common cold” is best understood as a broad category of respiratory viral illness that can include influenza and COVID-19, because the same kinds of viruses can cause anything from mild symptoms to severe disease. The conversation covers COVID immunity, Omicron, rhinovirus, hantavirus, virus transmission, masks, folk remedies, long COVID, airborne prevention, and the history of cold research, emphasizing that viruses are diverse, often poorly understood, and can have serious individual and social consequences. Miles stresses that prevention matters: better ventilation, HEPA filtration, masks in high-risk settings, staying home when sick, and stronger public health responses can reduce transmission and protect vulnerable people. DAVID MILES ON THE HANTAVIRUS: We asked David to write an assessment of the current hantavirus outbreak: At the time of writing (10th May 2026), there have been eight cases of Andes virus, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andes_virus] a species of hantavirus, on the cruise ship Hondius. It’s carried by rodents and causes a very serious disease, with fatality rates estimated between one and three-fifths. If that looks like a very wide range of estimates, it is. That’s because Andes virus infections are so rare that there’s a lot about them that simply isn’t known. The pandemic potential of Andes virus, as with any infectious disease, depends on its capacity for human-to-human transmission: whether it can pass from one person to another or whether it hits a dead end when it passes from a rodent to a human. Right now, that’s one of the things that is still not clear. Several previous Andes virus outbreaks have involved multiple cases – and far less media coverage – but it’s never been entirely clear whether they involved transmission to one person who infected everyone else or whether everyone was exposed to the same infected rodents. Part of the difficulty is that the time between infection and the first symptoms ranges from one to six weeks. It’s such a long time period that it isn’t possible to narrow down the possible sources of infection. With a narrower time window, it might be possible to work out what or who an infected person was exposed to but there’s no way to tell whether someone has come too close to a rodent in a five-week window. In the case of the Hondius outbreak, that means that we don’t know how those eight cases caught Andes virus. Maybe they were all exposed before they set sail. Maybe some infected rodents sneaked on board and everyone is now stuck on a ship with the infectious source. Maybe the passengers and crew are in fact transmitting it among themselves. It’s only the latter case that would imply any pandemic potential because only a virus that can transmit from one person to another can cause a pandemic. Even in that case, I would rate the pandemic potential as extremely low, albeit with a caveat. The reason for the extremely low rating is that if there’s doubt about Andes virus’s ability to transmit from one person to another, it certainly can’t do it very well. Outbreaks in the past have been contained and because this outbreak is on a ship, it’s clear who has been exposed. So far, the public health response has been following the precautionary principle of assuming human-to-human transmission and isolating anyone who might be infectious. The caveat is that the precautionary principle has not been extended to getting everyone off the ship as quickly as possible. Keeping a large number of people exposed to an infectious source, whether it’s rodents or each other, is a very good way to maximise the damage caused by an outbreak. Apart from the very real danger to the passengers and crew themselves, their close proximity means that even if the virus isn’t good at passing from one person to another, it has plenty of opportunity to do so. As soon as human-to-human transmission becomes a possibility, there is an evolutionary pressure to do it better. No such evolutionary pressure would exist if there were no human-to-human transmission at all. In conclusion, it is very unlikely that the Andes virus will infect anyone other than the passengers and crew of the Hondius but to be on the safe side, the sooner they’re off that ship and in isolation, the better for them and for everyone else. LINK * On Skeptical Inquirer: Letter to America Letter to America: Medic Alert [https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/letter-to-america-medic-alert/] VIDEO ON YOUTUBE ---------------------------------------- The post David Miles: The Viral Sneeze [https://plutopia.io/david-miles-the-viral-sneeze/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].