歐洲疫情文化戰爭 德語區上演

Sven Müller is proudly unvaccinated. He thinks COVID-19 vaccines are neither effective nor safe but a way to make money for pharmaceutical companies and corrupt politicians who are taking away his freedom.

斯凡．穆勒對未接種疫苗感到自豪。他認為新冠疫苗既不有效也不安全，是幫製藥公司及剝奪他自由的腐敗政客賺錢的一種方式。

Under state rules to stem coronavirus infections, he is no longer allowed to go to restaurants, to the bowling alley, to the cinema or to the hairdresser. From next week, he will be barred from entering most shops, too. But that has only strengthened his resolve.

遏制新冠病毒感染的邦法規定，他不得進入餐館、保齡球館、電影院或找理髮師。從下周起，他還被禁止進入多數商店，但這只會堅定他的決心。

“They can’t break me,” said Müller, 40, a bar owner in the town of Annaberg-Buchholz, in the Ore Mountain region in the eastern state of Saxony where the vaccination rate is 44% — the lowest in Germany.

40歲的穆勒說：「他們打不倒我。」他是德東薩克森邦厄爾士山區安娜貝格布赫霍爾茨鎮的一名酒吧老闆，當地疫苗接種率是全德國最低的44%。

Müller personifies a problem that is as sharp in some parts of Europe as it is in the United States. If Germany had red and blue states, Saxony would be crimson. In places like this, pockets of unvaccinated people are driving the latest round of contagion, filling strained hospital wards, putting economic recoveries at risk and sending governments scrambling to head off a fourth wave of the pandemic.

歐洲某些地區，有個問題與美國一樣激烈，穆勒是此事化身。若德國有紅州和藍州，薩克森邦將是深紅。在這樣的地方，一小群未接種疫苗的人正引發最新一波疫情，使得捉襟見肘的醫院病房人滿為患，令經濟復甦面臨風險，並讓政府在阻止第四波疫情爆發上疲於奔命。

Western European governments are resorting increasingly to thinly veiled coercion with a mixture of mandates, inducements and punishments.

西歐國家政府正逐漸採取幾乎不加掩飾的強制手段，包括強制令、誘導及處罰。

In many countries, it is working. When President Emmanuel Macron announced in July that vaccine passports would be required to enter most social venues, France — where anti-vaccine sentiment was strong — was one of the least vaccinated countries in Europe. Today it has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.

在許多國家，此舉正在發揮作用。今年7月，法國總統馬克宏宣布，進入大多數社交場所必須持有疫苗護照。當時，反疫苗情緒強烈的法國是歐洲接種疫苗最少的國家之一。如今它是世界上疫苗接種率最高國家之一。

Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy followed Macron’s lead with even tougher measures. There, and in Spain, too, attempts by populist parties to stoke a broad-based anti-vaccine backlash have largely been snuffed out.

義大利總理德拉吉跟隨馬克宏帶領，採取了更嚴厲措施。在西班牙，民粹主義政黨激起廣大反疫苗反對聲浪的企圖，基本上也被撲滅。

But regional resistance against the coronavirus vaccine remains. In Central and Eastern Europe — and in the German-speaking countries and regions bordering them — the problem is more stubborn.

但地區性抗拒疫苗的情況依舊存在。在中歐、東歐及相鄰的德語國家和地區，這個問題更棘手。

In Italy, the northern province of Bolzano — bordering Austria and Switzerland, where 70% of the population is German-speaking — has the country’s lowest vaccination rate.

在義大利，靠近奧地利與瑞士邊界的北部省分波爾察諾有70%人口講德語，該省疫苗接種率全國最低。

“There is some correlation with far-right parties, but the main reason is this trust in nature,” said Patrick Franzoni, a doctor who spearheads the inoculation campaign in the province. Especially in the Alps, he said, the German-speaking population trusts fresh air, organic produce and herbal teas more than traditional drugs.

在該省率先發起疫苗接種運動的醫師派崔克．佛蘭佐尼說：「這與極右翼政黨有些關係，但主要原因是對自然的信任。」他表示，尤其在阿爾卑斯山區，說德語的民眾更相信新鮮空氣、有機農產品與花草茶，而不是傳統藥物。

我們都該對彼此了解少一點

In 2017, after the shock of Brexit and then Donald Trump’s election, Christopher Bail, a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, set out to study what would happen if you forced people out of their social media echo chambers.

2017年，經歷過英國脫離歐盟與川普當選美國總統的震撼之後，美國杜克大學社會學與公共政策教授貝爾開始研究，逼迫人們脫離社群媒體同溫層會發生什麼事。

Bail is the director of The Polarization Lab, a team of social scientists, computer scientists and statisticians who study how technology amplifies political divisions. He and his colleagues recruited 1,220 Twitter users who identified as either Democrats or Republicans, offering to pay them $11 to follow a particular Twitter account for a month. Although the participants didn’t know it, the Democrats were assigned to follow a bot account that retweeted messages from prominent Republican politicians and thinkers. The Republicans, in turn, followed a bot account that retweeted Democrats.

貝爾是「兩極化實驗室」主任，這個實驗室是社會科學家、電腦科學家和統計學家組成的團隊，研究科技如何擴大政治分歧。他和同事招募1220名自認是民主黨人或共和黨人的推特網友，要求每人關注一個特定推特帳號一個月，並各發11美元酬勞。受試者並不知道規則，但實際上，民主黨人會被指派關注一個轉發知名共和黨政治人物和意見領袖推文的機器人帳號，共和黨人則關注轉發民主黨意見領袖推文的機器人帳號。

At the time, a lot of concern about the internet’s role in political polarization revolved around what digital activist Eli Pariser once called filter bubbles, a term for the way an increasingly personalized internet traps people in self-reinforcing information silos.

當時關於網路激化政治對立的作用，關注焦點集中在數位社會活動家帕里瑟曾說的「過濾泡泡」，這個詞描述日益個人化的網路內容會把人困在不斷自我增強的資訊孤島。

“The echo chamber idea was reaching its kind of apex in terms of its public influence,” Bail told me. “It nicely explained how Trump had won, how Brexit had happened.” Bail’s team wanted to see if getting people to engage with ideas they wouldn’t otherwise encounter might moderate their views.

貝爾告訴我：「同溫層這個概念對公眾的影響力已達頂峰，能很好地解釋為何川普當選，為何英國脫歐。」貝爾團隊想探究，讓人們接觸平常不會接觸的觀念，能否使他們的觀念變得溫和。

The opposite happened. “Nobody became more moderate,” Bail said. “Republicans in particular became much more conservative when they followed the Democratic bot, and Democrats became a little bit more liberal.”

結果適得其反。貝爾說：「沒有人變溫和，尤其是共和黨人，關注民主黨機器人帳號後變得保守許多，民主黨人則變得有點更偏向自由派。」

Social media platforms have long justified themselves with the idea that connecting people would make the world more open and humane. In offline life, after all, meeting lots of different kinds of people tends to broaden the mind, turning caricatures into complicated individuals. It’s understandable that many once believed the same would be true on the internet.

社群媒體平台一直為自己辯護，他們的說法是連結人們能讓世界變得更開放仁慈。畢竟在離線世界，與形形色色的人相遇通常會讓心胸更開闊，會使原本心目中的荒謬人物變成複雜的個體。可以理解，許多人一度以為在線上也一樣。

But it turns out there’s nothing intrinsically good about connection, especially online.

但結果是，連結本質上沒什麼好的，尤其在線上。

On the internet, exposure to people unlike us often makes us hate them, and that hatred increasingly structures our politics.

在網上，接觸不像我們的人往往會使我們恨他們，而這種恨意日益成為我們政治的結構。

The social corrosion caused by Facebook and other platforms isn’t a side effect of bad management and design decisions. It’s baked into social media itself.

臉書等平台引發的社會團結被侵蝕現象，並非管理不當和設計決策失誤引起的出乎意料後果，而是與社群媒體本身密不可分。