Hey, everyone. The TBD team is off this week, so we're re-airing an episode you might have missed.

It's a story about the real-life consequences of health care misinformation on Facebook.

This show originally aired back in the first week of March just before the coronavirus went global.

Now, access to accurate health care information is more important than ever.

And Facebook has enormous power to shape the information we receive, something they seem to have at least acknowledged by beginning to alert users when they've been exposed to misinformation and pointing them to accurate sources.

In this episode, we explore the underlying structures that allow misinformation to spread

on Facebook and the cost of doing too little to stop it. It's one of our favorites. Here's the show.

Hey, everyone. Just a heads up. This episode deals with some heavy topics around childbirth and

misinformation.

Brandy Zedrosny is a reporter for NBC News.

She covers internet culture and writes a lot about online communities.

In particular, communities where misinformation about health care spreads, groups for anti-vaxxers, groups for people who are really, really afraid of parasites, people looking for a place to share what they've heard and what they're frightened of. We think a lot about misinformation and disinformation in terms of political thought, right?

But when you look at medical misinformation from fake cancer products to, you know, fake autism, cures and all of it, those eclipse, like fake political news.

And when you have the medical model that we have now where you can hardly get into

see your doctor, many of us aren't insured, things are expensive, the place you're going to

turn to is the internet.

Many of these people look to private Facebook groups for answers.

And in one of those groups, which was focused on

unassisted birth, Brandy started to see posts from a woman named Judith. So I met Judith in February

of last year. And I met her because I belong to a lot of these sort of strange, fringy groups.

Judith was 28, and she grew up on the Pacific Coast. Like a lot of the other women in the

group, she wanted to give birth without a doctor or a midwife, something that's known as a free

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