Pinterest Cracks Down on Anti-Vaxxers, Pressuring Facebook To Follow (cnbc.com) 312
Social network Pinterest has taken a big step to stop the spread of false content that is damaging people's health, which could put pressure on competitors to follow. From a report: Pinterest said Wednesday that it would no longer return any search results, including pins and boards, for terms related to vaccinations, whether in favor or against them. It took that step in late 2018 after noticing that the majority of shared images on Pinterest cautioned people against vaccinations, despite medical guidelines demonstrating that most vaccines are safe for most people. Pinterest told CNBC on Wednesday that it's been hard to remove this anti-vaccination content entirely, so it put the ban in place until it can figure out a more permanent strategy. It's working with health experts including doctors, as well as the social media analysis company called Storyful to come up with a better solution, the company said.
Will it help? (Score:4, Interesting)
People aren't going on Pintrest to search for vaccines to learn and make a reasoned argument. The problem is they find it organically and get sucked in.
If people wanted to search for information, they would use Google.
Re:Will it help? (Score:5, Insightful)
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While I believe there are some people who think that Facebook is the internet (esp.in places where FB offers free "internet"), I don't think Pinterest is that big... yet. And, frankly, I doubt it ever will be that big.
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Comedy = Tragedy + Time
Re:Will it help? (Score:5, Insightful)
Got it, you think children(who cannot choose their parents) should die for the sins of the father (or mother). And, further, that herd immunity shouldn't exist for the non-negligible number of people for whom the vaccine doesn't take fully or cannot be vaccinated because of immune system disorders.
Re:Will it help? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm done trying to keep people alive. There's about 8 billion humans now. That's plenty.
You know why there are no 80+ year old anti-vaxers? Because they remember what an iron lung is. My grandma allegedly slapped a doctor because when I was born they stopped vaccinations for smallpox in our area and she was adamant that I HAVE TO get that vaccination. She lost a brother that way when she was a child.
I guess people have to lose loved ones again to be reminded that there's a reason for this.
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Arguably, this would be a bad thing in your fantasy world.
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Got it, you think children(who cannot choose their parents) should die for the sins of the father (or mother).
Isn't that the norm these days? Assuming we're talking about evil white people being punished for the sins of their ancestors, of course. It's happening right now in South Africa.
Or assuming we're talking about late-term abortions, that's another way children can die for the sins of their parents.
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ot it, you think children(who cannot choose their parents) should die for the sins of the father (or mother).
Children can't choose their parents but as a society we can choose who can be parents. It might be time we started thinking about that. We remove children from unfit parents every day for the health and safety of the child. I don't see any reason that we should treat this group of nut balls any different.
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They should not be vaccinated. Let Darwin have his share of idiots.
This is the cure for most forms of medical quackery, but the antivaxers affect people other than themselves. It's like overuse of antibiotics.
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There is a gap between "works for everybody" and "doesn't work", and that gap is largely covered by herd immunity when enough people are vaccinated. Why do you think there's lots of unrecorded side effects and injuries? Got any evidence?
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Not about free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how society loses its freedom of speech.
Oh bullshit. A private company squashing factually wrong information that results in people becoming sick and dying is hardly a slippery slope to the elimination of free speech. Anti-vaxxers are the slow equivalent of people shouting fire in a movie theater. They are causing needless panic and should be liable for the harm the lies they spread cause.
Sure it's just pintrest and possibly facebook; but what if google decided to weigh in with their opinon on the matter?
I hope they do. Anti-vaxxers are hurting people and it needs to stop as soon as possible.
The slippery slope might be a fallacious argument, but it's not always wrong.
It's definitely wrong in this case.
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Oh bullshit. A private company squashing factually wrong information that results in people becoming sick and dying is hardly a slippery slope to the elimination of free speech. Anti-vaxxers are the slow equivalent of people shouting fire in a movie theater. They are causing needless panic and should be liable for the harm the lies they spread cause.
All censorship starts with good intentions (or at least what its authors think are good intentions).
Re:Not about free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it *is* how a society loses free speech, but you need to frame the argument in a more general form, thus:
Communication channels being governed by a small group controlling what content can go over them is how societies lose free speech.
Now if the question becomes, "Is this a worse than average infringement on free speech?" the answer is clearly no, but it *is* a component of the way societies lose free speech, just as trolls and astroturfers are.
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Since adding "threats to feelings" as a type of violence and direct threat, pool of things we can sensor has really expanded.
Adding threats to social norms (unless in a protected class) should help complete the task of eliminating the unapproved diversity and misinformation on the internet.
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1) Freedom of speech has only ever been about government squashing of it. Corporations are not included in this conversation.
2) What company in their right mind is going to allow people to use their name and platform to publish and distribute lies that get people killed? That specifically get children killed? That's a recipe for a lawsuit.
About the only way a company could get away with allowing dangerous speech like this is if they can get classified as common carrier, but then you have to not be censoring
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It could be, if this were the case. I can't think of any example of this in modern times, though. We have the Internet. Anybody can communicate with anybody else.
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It's easy to get hosting for what you want to say. The Nazis were kicked off a few sites, but eventually got one. With government censorship, they couldn't have. You'll have no problem setting up an anti-vaxxer site if you're stupid enough to believe that crap.
Have you thought about what it would mean if private sites were required to publish anything someone wanted them to? That's what you're advocating.
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When the private platform is the only platform for speech
It's not. And even if it were ...
then it is just as bad as any goverment censorship.
It's still not. Government censorship precludes you building a platform. Private censorship does not.
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Re: Will it help? (Score:5, Insightful)
I too am a fascist, and enjoy suppressing others who have a different opinion or experience.
Hey Anonymous Coward, I don't know why we have to keep writing the same response over and over and over again when someone like you makes a strawman "fascist" anti-"free speech" argument again, but here we are.
This is not a fascist government saying that morons can't make anti-vax posts, and jailing them from doing so.
You can park yourself in front of the White House from dawn to dusk with anti-vax signs and no one will arrest you or shut you down. Other people will engage with you and call you a moron, but no one in government will curtail your freedom of speech. If you put up an anti-vax blog, no one from the government will shut it down.
It's not fascist when private corporations like Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter regulate what content can be hosted on their platforms. YouTube could update their terms tomorrow saying that they are now only hosting cat videos, and it would be within their rights. If you don't like their rules, don't use their platforms, or create your own platform.
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No, it needs to be SAFE to change their minds (Score:4, Insightful)
I also don't think that social pressure like this changes any minds. We should actually reason with people/explain the position on how vaccines save lives and what controls there are if something goes wrong with a vaccine. It's true, they're not perfect, but they're a lot better than the diseases they replace. We wiped out Polio.
It's stupid to try to beat people into believing something like this when they have a mix of real concerns and bad information, instead we should point out that we know the faults, we have a way of handling things, and we're trying to make them better and that we don't just rely on the say-so of random drug companies.
But I think the jihad against anti-vaxxers does more harm than good. Instead, we should help people get vaccinations and help them learn why we promote them so that it's safe to change their minds, rather than trying to make them feel under attack.
Yes, it's stupid and harmful, but they're people who don't know any better and this sort of reaction is also harmful.
Re:No, it needs to be SAFE to change their minds (Score:5, Funny)
Reason with them until they fall asleep, then vaccinate them.
Re:No, it needs to be SAFE to change their minds (Score:5, Insightful)
I've tried reasoning. Forget it. You're dealing with religious zeal here. No amount of sense, proof or demonstrable facts will have any kind of impact.
You have a bunch of people who will not only question whether you're a paid shill but simply brush aside anything you bring to the table as forged and fake, then turn around and pull some shit out of their ass that "proves" their point. These people have never learned to tell fact from fiction and have no way of discriminating between something that is demonstrably true and something someone whipped up for whatever reason. They will literally believe what they want to believe, for no good (or even bad) reason other than "I feel this is right".
Re:No, it needs to be SAFE to change their minds (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll also move goalposts like crazy. If you somehow manage to disprove Belief A even despite their attempts to ignore all evidence, then they'll simply move to "I don't vaccinate because of Belief B." At best, it's an endless game of Whack-A-Mole. This isn't to say that education isn't important, but don't hold your breath that an anti-vaxxer will accept your well researched argument.
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People aren't going on Pintrest to search for vaccines to learn and make a reasoned argument. The problem is they find it organically and get sucked in.
If people wanted to search for information, they would use Google.
Problem is, even on Google you are going to get pointed to some misleading materials on vaccines. This strange mixture of sometime science and conspiracy theory that the anti-vax folks peddle is quite invasive and far reaching. There is just enough truth mixed in with their confirmation bias based opinion to persuade a lot of folks and show up on a lot of pages returned by Google.
I think this whole anti-vaccine mess is emblematic of the nature of facts and opinion in today's internet driven age, where obje
Re:Will it help? (Score:5, Insightful)
Try avoid looking back at the world through rose tinted glasses and thinking that things were so much better. It usually wasn't and people tend to tunnel on one or two small areas that were pretty good while forgetting all of the things that weren't.
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The problem is that in the "good old days", pre-internet, the nutter was one per 1000. And he had to interact with those 1000 others who were not nuttier than squirrel poop and who didn't think the aliens from Zrbt are listening in on their thoughts. And at least for the non-clinical cases of insanity, this was enough to convince them that they're wrong.
Today, that one in a thousand means nothing because it's not one in thousand, it's ten thousands in ten millions. Sure, the sane people still outnumber the
Re: Will it help? (Score:2)
That's just not even remotely true. Look at some of the TV shows from the past. Remember Leonard Nemoy's "In Search Of"? Complete horseshit from start to finish, yet millions of people swallowed it whole.
Most people have believed all kinds of stupid shit for as long as our species has been on this planet. Whether it's things like gods and demons, leprechauns and fairies, witches, ghosts, bigfoot, the loch ness monster, or little green men with anal probes, there has never been a shortage of people willi
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It's not just Facebook but the Internet in general. It's the double-edged sword of the Internet. I can find and talk with other people who enjoy some obscure show/hobby that nobody else in my town enjoys. That's great. Unfortunately, if that "obscure show/hobby" is really "denying science because I have some vague belief that it's evil", then I can find others like this and we can feed off of each other, letting the conspiracy grow and suck more people in when it would otherwise have died out.
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The internet has little to do with objectivity being scorned and subjective truth values. Humans have always been susceptible to these, myths are testament to this. The only cure is education, and it is an incomplete cure. Some kids get indoctrinated by their parents, where is the dividing line between indoctrination and teaching your kids. Your kids are not property to done with as one pleases. This requires discipline to allow kids to find their own voice and not merely parroted ideas from their parents.
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The Anti-Vaxers might be an easy target, but the problem is bigger than just this one issue.
Long gone are the days when actual facts where not in dispute and sources of information where vetted before being considered credible. I miss those days.
Maybe one day we can get rid of the internet and other progress made and get back to the good old days! Then you won't have to feel nostalgic anymore :)
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Disputing facts is not the problem. Actually, questioning established "knowledge" is what drives science.
The problem is that it's usually done by people who have no idea how to do that. Being "skeptic" of established knowledge doesn't mean that I don't like A and think that A is false, so I believe B without evidence. But that's what usually happens.
Whether that's anti-vacc, flat earth, chemtrails or whatever other nutty conspiracy theory you can pull out of some dark, smelly place, the modus operandi is th
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The problem is when people get onto Conspiracy logic thinking. When ever we discredit experts as being part of some conspiracy because what they say doesn't fit into our world view, then we fall in the hole of stupid, which is very hard to get out.
Don't think for a minute that your political standing, your level of education, or religion (or lack of) that you follow will make you immune. We all can fall into Conspiracy logic thinking on a particular topic. From Flat Earth, Global Warming Denial, anti GMO,
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I'm sorry, are you saying that the dangers of lead and smoking are overstated by some sinister conspiracy?
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The dangers of secondhand smoke were deliberately misrepresented by experts of the day, who were anti-smoking zealots. Basically, anything with political consequences will be misrepresented to gain the desired outcome. Even if there's some underlying truth, the extent can be misrepresented to manufacture fear and thus political action.
The problem with anti-vaxxers is really that they will put 100 children at real risk in order to remove some tiny, imagined risk to their precious angel. That's a bigger pr
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the Liberal Agenda, the Billionaire Conservative agenda
So the only non-nutters are non-rich conservatives?
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"If people wanted to search for information, they would use Google."
Yeah, there you'd get 'Did you mean Anti-Fat?'
Trouble is they're prime real estate (Score:5, Insightful)
During the election when all that fake news was going around somebody interviewed the sys admin of one of the bigger networks. He was just in it for the ad revenue (and racking in a ton).
He was asked why he targeted the folks he did. It came down to certain groups of people would share and spread his crap, while other groups would debunk it instantly and it wouldn't get very far.
Anti-Vaxxers are like that. They'll spread your nonsense because they're already prepared to believe nonsense.
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I think you just identified why religions are so successful.
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Makes you wonder why they act the same way. Anti-vaxers and flat earth believers follow the same thought model. You have something you don't like for some reason, so the opposite has to be true, and anything supporting your newfound pet idea is accepted (even if fake or debunked), everything contradicting it is brushed off as some industry complex conspiracy.
Is it true? Does thinkofthechildren turn your brains off?
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They've got different priors and different goals. So they reach different conclusions even with the same thought process.
They *don't* act the same way. They act in ways that have certain similarities, but differ in other ways. And there is no such thing as "general intelligence". There is "executive function" which is correlated with many different kinds of intelligence, but is not in and of itself any intelligence. (It's rather like having a large RAM buffer.) It's lets you hold ideas longer while pr
Not sure about the anti-vaxxers (Score:2)
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About what topic? Because about the only thing know about them (their defining characteristic), is that they are dead wrong on understanding vaccines, autism, epidemiology, children's rights and all other disciplines that contribute to why you should vaccinate your damn kids (medical exceptions obviously apply).
They used to tend to be more affluent (which is associated with educated but not informed), but it seems to have gone mainst
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>Anti-Vaxxers are among some of the most educated and best informed people.
One or the other. you cannot be both.
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I think in at least some cases, it actually is clear-cut malice.
If you understand how herd immunity works, but also worry about potential side effects of a vaccine (ie. if you don't buy into most of the anti-vaxx nonsense, but still don't like elective medical procedures), you might opt to not get vaccinations, weighing the risks to the herd by having one less vaccination against the risk imposed by the vaccine. It's essentially a form of the tragedy of the commons. Increase the risk to everyone to slightly
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Time to export all native born Texans.
https://object.cato.org/sites/... [cato.org]
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While you have a small point, it's worth noting that people tend to continue to believe the first version of a story that they hear, even when they are (temporarily) convinced that it was an accident or fraud.
So apologies and retractions are insufficient to repair the harm done. But rarely is any further action either undertaken, or even attempted. And it's usually not clear how the harm *could* be repaired. (No, money is not a universal solvent.)
Thanks Pinterest. Trying to do good by doing bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't care what people say about vaccines or what ever. Say it, and be counted if you really feel needed. When will be stop "cracking down" on what is ok to say and not? This always sounds great till it's your point of view that is squished. Best part is you usually won't even know it. Companies can do this all the time in the background.
Of course these are public companies so they can do what they like. It's just a medium.
As far as vaccines, I'll get my advise from my doctor.
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It's demonstrably harmful to others. It should be treated the same as advocating for violence.
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I can only assume that you're either a moron or an ignoramus. Seriously, you idiot, look up herd immunity.
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Someone spreading measles because of being not vaccinated is dangerous to others.
Re:Thanks Pinterest. Trying to do good by doing ba (Score:5, Informative)
How? How is someone who isn't vaccinated harmful to someone who is? Isn't that the whole point of vaccinations? Or, do they not work?
Vaccinations work, but they are not 100% effective. An important measure of infectious diseases is the basic reproduction number, or R-nought. This represents the average number of infections that one sick person will create. Suppose mumps has an R-nought of 5, and you have a vaccine with 90% effectiveness, then the effective R-nought, after vaccination, is 0.5.
The critical point is an R-nought of 1. If you get below that, the diseases is expected to die out over time. If it is higher, then the disease is expected to grow. Getting the value from 5 to 0.5 will make a huge difference, which you would get if everybody is vaccinated. If too few people are vaccinated, R-nought will grow, and disease can spread, and will also infect 10% of the vaccinated population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Thanks Pinterest. Trying to do good by doing ba (Score:5, Insightful)
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If the anti-vaxxers would just let their kids die after getting infected I wouldn't complain, but I get to foot the bill to prolong the life of their spawn.
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Here ya go:
Vaccinations and herd immunity in a nutshell by Penn and Teller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
TLDW: In other words, yes, people refusing to vaccinate is actually harmful to the herd.
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Three ways:
1) Vaccinations aren't 100% effective. If they are 99.9% effective then for every million people vaccinated, there will be 1,000 without protection.
2) Babies who are too young to get the vaccine can be infected by people who weren't vaccinated.
3) People with medical conditions that prevent them from being vaccinated (e.g. immune system issues) can be infected by peo
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And this type of ignorance is why anti-vaxxers have to be stopped from the outside. You cannot fight your way though the shell of ignorance and disinformation.
Re:Thanks Pinterest. Trying to do good by doing ba (Score:5, Insightful)
When will be stop "cracking down" on what is ok to say and not?
Why would we stop cracking down on stupid, incorrect, dangerous information? As long as it's not the government inhibiting your right to say it, how could you possibly have a problem with public and private entities of society trying to downplay bad information and promote good information? You'd have to be utterly ignorant of history to think good information magically bubbles up simply by inherent quality.
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SirSlud, thank you for your comment. Again, who decides what is "dangerous" information? People lie all the time, it's life. People shout down the opposing side by calling others names and labeling them with incorrect labels. Really what needs to happen is simply have a conversation. But this is a personal thing.
Stupid information? Again says who? From what point of view?
Thankfully, I'm not utterly ignorant of history, I fall between somewhat, and so-so.
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"Again, who decides what is "dangerous" information?"
I don't see a lot of people arguing over who decides what cars don't get allowed on the road or what plants we feed to the animals at the zoo or what kind of fuel we put in the airplanes we fly in.
As in, it depends on what the information is, who is saying it, and how they're saying it. All this handwringing about a website going, "Nah, spread that shit somewhere else" is ludicrous in the face of living in a society in which 99.99% of our existence is gov
Re: Thanks Pinterest. Trying to do good by doing b (Score:2)
All this handwringing about a website going, "Nah, spread that shit somewhere else" is ludicrous in the face of living in a society in which 99.99% of our existence is governed by decisions we don't get a say in.
This kind of reasoning is exactly why your life is governed by decisions in which you have no say.
"We already live in a society where 99.9897% of our life is governed by things in which we have no say, so taking away one more right from you won't hurt anything."
"We already live in a society where 99.9898% of our life is governed by things in which we have no say, so taking away one more right from you won't hurt anything."
"We already live in a society where ...."
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Who decides what information is good then?
In theory and in current and historical practice in free-enough societies, it depends entirely on what the information in question is. Surely your question isn't "what one entity decides what all information is good then?"
Scientists and doctors (Score:5, Insightful)
Who decides what information is good then? Think for one second.
Scientists and doctors backed up by appropriate government agencies staffed by experts in the field. This question is EXACTLY why we have the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, etc. It's their mission to prevent quackery and they do it very well. Pretending that nobody is worthy to decide what is good data is idiotic.
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Doesn't TFA make it clear that they stopped all vaccination results for now until a panel of experts decide what to do about the topic?
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At the very least they should put up a banner "Free Speech Not Allowed on This Platform." As you said, "these are public companies so they can do what they like" but terms and conditions do matter and must be disclosed.
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This would be a little like Porsche dealerships putting a sign up saying, "No pooping in the middle of the showroom."
You don't need that sign because it wasn't implied to the vast majority of emotionally functional adults that you ever had that privilege in the first place.
Re: Thanks Pinterest. Trying to do good by doing b (Score:2)
If "the vast majority of emotionally functional adults" truly accept it as a given that they do not have "the privilege" of speaking their mind in a public forum, then that is an incredibly sad commentary on the condition of our species.
Censorship is not the answer. (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, I'm not only in favour of vaccinations, I need people to have them myself, because I'm immuno-compromised. These kinds of measures, however, are not helpful. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and by censoring this discussion you're only going to create a situation where these people are all the more staunchly against it, and create sympathy for them from individuals who value civil liberties. By the by, I would say this is an attempt to create a further propaganda instrument, dressed up in an argument for censorship that looks appealing. As Picard said in Drumhead, "Those whom cloak themselves in good intentions, are well-camouflaged."
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Every action has an equal and opposite reaction
Incorrect. You're conflating a law of physics with society and human behavior, an system with an incredibly large number of parameters. I get why people *want* it to be simple, to operate according to simple to define and understand rules, but it's simply not the case in any observable sense.
Re:Censorship is not the answer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to belabor the point, but TFA clearly states in the summary that they halted ALL vaccination results (Both for and against) until a panel of experts could decide what to do about the topic. They are not taking a stand and blocking anti-vaxxers, they are doing the single most reasonable thing possible at this moment which is to avoid spreading bad information, not painting either side as the hero of vicitim and trying to engage both medical and social media experts on a best solution.
If there's a better possible stance for them to take, I have not yet seen it.
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I don't find "we have studied the issue, and have decided we'll publish misleading and positively dangerous information that influences people to foster epidemics on our website anyway" to be as tenable and appealing a position as you clearly do.
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Fuck. A +6 post, I have mod points, it is an anonymous coward, and it is already at +5. *sigh*
Damnit, why couldn't you have logged in to say this?
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and by censoring this discussion you're only going to create a situation where these people are all the more staunchly against it
They aren't censoring discussion. Anti-vaxxers never have discussions.
Slippery Slope (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably useless (Score:3)
There is no cure for the common stupidity and its variants of anti-vaxxing, flat-earthing, etc.
I also do not agree that this is censorship. Freedom of speech does not go so far that gross lies that harm and kill people can be tolerated.
Censorship (Score:3)
I hope "crack down" means adding things like a scare tag. This item has been detected to contain fraudulent information. Even in fullscreen mode or whatever it is these socialwhoring apps do.
Simple deletion (or his shittier big brother, stealth deletion) is pretty much censorship. That's legal for a private platform, but it's still a terrible practice to loudly decry.
Things like bomb threats and fire in a theater can be controlled because they commit a second act that you CAN charge. The original act, speech, is not directly controlled. Speech is never federally controlled - it gets compromised inclusively, incidentally, not directly.
Antivax circlejerking is a pox (lol) but it's hard to prove legally-actionable harm from it. So, like I said, shame it, ridicule it, you control the platform. Easy workaround.
Social Network? (Score:2)
That's not a crackdown (Score:3)
What Pintrist is doing isn't a crackdown. They are distancing themselves from the "controversy".
It's possible that they just don't want to spend the effort to police content, since that's what they'd have to do to allow vaccination stuff while blocking anti-vax stuff, but calling it a crackdown is incorrect.
Sometimes, censorship is the answer. (Score:2)
Not by the government, but sometimes private companies SHOULD censor users. It's called ethics.
If we censored every "conspiracy theory"... (Score:2, Troll)
... Jussie Smollet would have gotten away with it. Remember kids : It was those nasty vile alt-right conspiracy theorists who first cast doubt on his way too perfect narrative!
Challenging established orthodoxy is how you progress, contrary to the pro-Censorship crowd. Ideas become widespread because they are challenged and survive those challenges, coming out on top. If your idea is really good, and your way is really best, you don't need to silence your opponents, you can handily defeat them.
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Challenging established orthodoxy, yes. But the process matters. What is done right now by the various bullshit artists is basically to say "A is established knowledge, but I say A is wrong because of (insert very bad argument here), so I dreamed up B, which I found a few pointers that let me imagine it's true, so I believe that now. And the thousands of contradictions you find are just big conspiracies from the industry, the Illuminati, NASA, you name it so I brush them aside and ignore them".
That's NOT ho
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Challenging established orthodoxy, yes. But the process matters. What is done right now by the various bullshit artists is basically to say "A is established knowledge, but I say A is wrong because of (insert very bad argument here), so I dreamed up B, which I found a few pointers that let me imagine it's true, so I believe that now. And the thousands of contradictions you find are just big conspiracies from the industry, the Illuminati, NASA, you name it so I brush them aside and ignore them".
That's NOT how you improve our knowledge. That's how you destroy it.
What you are saying is just a variant of "there's no problem; we'll just censor the bad ideas, so what could go wrong?"
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In a perfect society, I'd have to agree with you. Challenging the status quo is how you avoid being either misled or stuck in an institutionalized rut.
But when the individuals involved and making decisions based on fear and other emotions and not on facts, there is only conflict, not resolution or improvement.
To argue the other side of your "ripped from today's headlines" approach: If the anti-vaxxer had not taken their child to the sports game, they would not have had a measles outbreak actually harming a
Ban everything! (Score:2)
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But they're funny!
I know, I know, it's so very non-PC these days to laugh about retards, but ... please let me have that little guilty pleasure.
Re: (Score:2)
I would no consider all over 21 states of the US [cnn.com] a localized phenomenon.
Re:Given I know someone personally harmed by vacin (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh YOU're the one who knows someone harmed by vaccines!
Hey, folks, we found the guy!
Great. Want to go back a few years and discuss whether a polio vaccine could potentially be a good thing? Maybe in an Iron Lung ward?
Re: (Score:3)
Throwing away all of the moderations I did in this discussion:
Ok. You know someone who was harmed by vaccines. Do you know anyone who has been harmed by disease? Have you seen what the diseases do?
The ultimate question:
Do you feel that the harm done by the vaccine was greater than the harm done by the virus the vaccine was proof against?
Mind you, in order to answer that question fully, you have to consider how many people are harmed by the vaccine and how many people are harmed by the disease. You can't jus
Re: (Score:2)
The trouble with the argument about antibiotics is that many doctors only reluctantly prescribe them when they shouldn't be used. It *is* a problem that they let the patients browbeat them into issuing the prescriptions, I'll agree, but that's different from pushing something.
More of the problem with the antibiotics is caused by the agri-business.
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Oh bullshit.
I went to the doctor years back for a respiratory infection that lasted more than a week and they threw antibiotics at me.
I went to the same doctor (saw the same actual doctor) a couple of years later for a similar but more severe issue and specifically asked for antibiotics because work was ramping up the following week and being out sick would have been a major setback.
Then I got the lecture about how they're overprescribed, how I'm an idiot that needs to be talked down to, blah blah blah.
That