Social media amplified pre-existing grievance rather than creating the vaccine-autism belief.

Evidence

The blame for the spike in misinformation falsely claiming that vaccines cause autism is usually linked with the rise of social media, and the fact that junk vaccine science circulated there unchecked for years. Telling parents that children are being permanently disabled by routine vaccinations is certainly a sensational message, one seemingly made for the attention economy. But as with misinformation related to Covid, social media only intensified tendencies that were already present. In my conversations with autism parents who have gone the vaccine-blaming route, I am always struck by their sense that they have been cheated or wronged; that someone or something robbed them of what they were sure were their rightful, neurotypical kids and substituted them with ones who were different and defective; that their families had somehow been invaded. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 643

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Klein’s diagnostic insight: the felt experience of being cheated/robbed/invaded is the emotional substrate that predates and exceeds any particular misinformation platform — this is the psychological engine the Mirror World metabolizes. It quietly foreshadows the Israel/Palestine chapters where displacement and substitution recur.
• XREF: Directly extends the earlier chapter’s claim that misinformation intensifies pre-existing tendencies rather than creating them; also anticipates the doubling device — parents feel their real child was ‘substituted’ with a defective one.