You think the internet is a clown show now? You ain’t seen nothing yet | John Naughton

Social media platforms are laying off their trust and safety' teams. Brace yourself for a new wave of unfettered misinformation and abuse

Robert F Kennedy Jr is a flake of Cadbury proportions with a famous name. He's the son of Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 when he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination (and therefore also JFK's nephew). Let's call him Junior. For years - even pre-Covid-19 - he's been running a vigorous anti-vaccine campaign and peddling conspiracy theories. In 2021, for example, he was claiming that Dr Anthony Fauci was in cahoots with Bill Gates and the big pharma companies to run a powerful vaccination cartel" that would prolong the pandemic and exaggerate its deadly effects with the aim of promoting expensive vaccinations. And it went without saying (of course) that the mainstream media and big tech companies were also in on the racket and busily suppressing any critical reporting of it.

Like most conspiracists, Junior was big on social media, but then in 2021 his Instagram account was removed for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines", and in August last year his anti-vaccination Children's Health Defense group was removed by Facebook and Instagram on the grounds that it had repeatedly violated Meta's medical-misinformation policies.