this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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I was talking with someone from the UK about this article that they showed me. They were outraged by it, and I said I don't see what the problem is with it. They were weirdly fixated on the "asylum seekers" part, to which I told them the article says it will apply to vulnerable persons regardless of immigration status, and I asked them why they were fixating so much on this applying to one specific demographic.
This caused them to go on a tirade about "migrants are getting more rights than people who were born in this country" and how they aren't a racist because they married an Italian. They said "it's all about divide and conquer" and I asked them why they care so much about what ethnicity or nationality a person is, over if they're vulnerable and receiving healthcare equality or not. This quickly devolved into them going on about how the UK is "being taken over by migrants". So, I asked them if they knew any of these migrants, if the UK is "being taken over" by them. They said no.
This started from them watching a YouTube video made by some influencer who was getting angry over the same article. I'm more than convinced that social media can have its bad sides.
I can kind of see their thought processes there. They're sharing right-wing media so they're likely already primed for those biases, plus that article title is intentionally misleading by suggesting asylum seekers will by default get priority over all other patients. It isn't until the sixth paragraph that they admit it's priority care for vulnerable people which is a group that happens to include asylum seekers and undocumented migrants (terms which this writer uses interchangeably, because of course they do). Very poor journalistic integrity even for a rag like this one, imo.
This type of article is intentionally misleading and written primarily to rile up people with poor media literacy. Making people angry makes it easier to manipulate them, and vulnerable groups are naturally less able to fight back so they're an easy target.
In an ideal world after being challenged they would have reevaluated the source and their beliefs. In practice very few people do that and they just get more entrenched instead. Especially if it's someone anonymous online just telling them they're wrong.
Yeah, it seems like there are a lot of people who will only read the headlines, which when combined with what headline they went with is egregious. Honestly, clickbait such as this is a pet peeve I have with media in general.