Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead.

I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings.

Anything requested and approved will be read and a decent quality review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Although I found the authors writing informative, their discussion is a bit one-note. By focusing on government and politicians without considering the powerful role of "group think" in contemporary society, their book isn't a thorough picture of the limits to free expression that affected this world emergency. Homogenization of thought is as much a threat to Western democracies as populist leaders.and nationalism; indeed, these things feed on each other. THE INFODEMIC contributes to our understanding of the pandemic but is hardly definitive. It's a book produced in the moment that offers some insight. It will take future historians to make sense of the crisis and its impact on free society.

This is a book that I'm afraid won't age well, as interest is already probably already pretty well waned and a lot of people want to forget about the pandemic completely. I was interested in the premise but ultimately found the book very dry and hard to get through. It will be a good read for a specific niche.

What a muddled & confusing book! The author's thesis is that governments controlled the flow of information & reduced their people's freedoms by using the pandemic as an excuse. However, by cherry-picking the countries he talks about, by not being informed about valid criticisms of what "everybody" knows, and by repeating endlessly about lockdowns, mask-wearing and social distancing (without examining strong evidence to the contrary), he shows a woeful ignorance that demonstrates that the infoemic worked because his selective and one-sided view of things demonstrates that hew's been taken in.

A serious examination of the role of censorship and the reduction of freedoms during the pandemic needs to be written, but by someone who is objective and not biased.

In their forthcoming book, The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, journalists Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney critically examine the way that governments around the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on examples from a wide variety of countries including regimes with authoritarian leaders and nations run by democratic populists, Simon and Mahoney chart the impact of COVID-19 on the media landscape in countries such as Russia, Iran, Nicaragua, Singapore, Egypt, Brazil, India and the United States. Using the concepts of positive and negative liberty as a framework, Simon and Mahoney engage with difficult questions of press freedom, misinformation, censorship, data security and state surveillance.

Throughout the book, Simon and Mahoney acknowledge the legitimacy of placing restrictions on positive liberty for the sake of public health during a crisis, while also expressing concern about the ways that leaders have been able to usher in waves of concerning legislation during the pandemic, such as unprecedented levels of data collection and state surveillance, without any indication that measures will be reversed after the virus is contained. This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about press freedom and the current health of our media landscape.

Although Simon and Mahoney discuss a wide variety of countries and leaders in their book, they definitely spend significantly more time referencing the United States, Donald Trump and American media. Although this decision makes sense given the likely readership of this book, I personally found the sections of the book discussing other countries to be much more interesting and engaging. I also think that the importance and significance of the ideas being discussed cannot be fully understood without looking at a range of countries and government responses to the pandemic. Through this book, Simon and Mahoney have done an important work of chronicling the struggle of journalists and the importance of press freedom worldwide, while also providing citizens with important information to help them to think critically about the current world order.

Very eye-opening and timely. A journalists' look at the information and misinformation that has been circulating about Covid and how governments in some major countries have handled the pandemic. I have a pretty good handle on how things were dealt with in the US, but I wasn't aware of the situation in other parts of the world, notably Brazil, China, Mexico, and the Philippines. Fascinating and disturbing. Not really a "page-turner", but definitely a good read for anyone interested in journalism or politics or foreign relations.

The Infodemic is a book about Covid-19 and how a selection of governments around the world reacted to it. Mainly it is about how different governments reacted by imposing censorship and a limitation of freedoms. It is about the perceived worldwide decline of freedom and democracy worldwide during the times of Covid.

I’m impressed and surprised by this book. I was worried that it would be a work of propaganda itself but in my opinion it is not. It presents a concise log of how multiple countries faced the spread of Covid and how they responded to the threat of it. It presents this information in an easy to absorb manner and is very well written. It covers both autocratic and democratic countries and shows the ways that they succeeded against and failed with their approach to containing the spread of the outbreak.

Overall I like the approach that this book has. It has a lot of information and presents it very well. It presents its case in a very clear manner and shows the reasoning that different countries may have had for their approaches to the pandemic. I highly recommend this for nonfiction readers and readers looking for more information on the history of the pandemic and on current events.