What bothers me is how literally every story about this sees a horde of comments embracing the slippery slope fallacy. Not all slopes are slippery. It is possible draw lines and stick to them over time.
I do not believe banning or censoring blatant misinformation is bad. We have more information at our fingertips than ever before and I personally believe that we should be able to access all that knowledge freely without censorship.
There is some information better not shared though and this is where I am divided. We do not have an obligation to inform or influence anyone's decisions - but when those decisions harm childrens' lives then I think action needs to be taken. This is the most obvious action that could have been taken and I'm glad it was.
The government doesn't _need_ to censoring anything if they get the companies to it for them.
That is fascism.
So is telling private companies what they have to do with their property.
'Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power' ― Benito Mussolini
I run a site that makes it really easy to connect people who want to give money and people who have some reason they think they should have money. I decide that I don't want people who are raising money for anti-vax campaigns on my site, so I ban them.
Then, someone comes in and says "no no, you can't do that, you have to allow them to use your site." Who gets to decide that, and by what criteria? What if I also decide I don't want to allow anti-government militias to use my site to buy firearms? As soon as you force a private entity to do business with people even if they don't want to, you're also on a slippery slope.
...or maybe you're not. Maybe there are plenty of plaes to draw these lines, like, "you can't refuse service to people if you are doing so based on certain categories, like race, sex, religious belief, etc. because we as a nation have decided it's important."
I think we should allow companies like GoFundMe to ban whomever they like, unless they are discriminating based on the protected categories that are already clearly defined.
I am just pointing out that there is no longer any real censorship any more that we are legally protected against simply because the government is never involved directly in it.
So simply repeating the mantra "business can't censor" isn't really true in a strict analysis.
Consider that the baker who didn't want to bake a cake with words on it that he objected to was sued (successfully). But I saw almost no support for _that_ business's freedom to choose.
Censorship has turned into a mob tool of control.
Businesses have been refusing to do business with people and people have been refusing to use businesses for a very long time, this isn't some new thing.
And we actually do have protections, enshrined in civil rights legislation. You can't be denied service because of your race, gender, religion, and a couple other categories depending on the service and the state. But your stance on vaccinations is not a protected category. If you want to expand the protected categories, that's a different conversation.
> Consider that the baker who didn't want to bake a cake with words on it that he objected to was sued (successfully).
Yeah, because sexual orientation is a protected class.
> Censorship has turned into a mob controlled tool of control.
You're describing a boycott. It's a form of protest. It's "mob controlled" in the same sense as all other forms of protest
If the company chooses to do so, then this is a non-issue. It's no different than YCombinator banning someone who decides to spam the comments. Or Youtube banning a channel because it's posting porn videos. This is literally the same concept as that, except it's GoFundMe with anti-vax.
And of course they do it in their own interests, that's the duty of a fiduciary.
1. Gets removed from a platform and told go makes your own platform!
2. Goes makes a platform.
3. Gets removed from the DNS. Told to become his own DNS host.
4. Makes DNS service.
5. Gets kicked off the cloud hosting. Told go make your own hosting.
6. Gets his own hosting.
7. Gets blocked at the payment processing. Gets told to figure out how be his own payment processor.
Somewhere there there's also apps being pulled from Playstore and iTunes.
This will bite us in the butt. Pendulum always swings both ways and we will be on a receiving side of it in future.
Free people. There is a legal line that circumscribes the lines that cannot be drawn. You cannot decide not to do business with someone on the basis of gender or of race, for example.
But if you don't want people jerking off in your restaurant, you're free to kick them out. Same for people spreading bullshit. (Though, importantly, the government can't do anything to the bullshit-spreaders.)
As far as your personal interests go, again the presumption should be that if it isn’t your property, and you have no contracts stating otherwise, it isn’t yours to decide whether a decision is made in your own personal best interest.
What if this was asbestos back in the day. "It's safe, we all use it, if it wasn't then our internal study would have told us." So they start banning anyone saying asbestos is unsafe. How long would it take us to fix all the blocks that are crying to save people from actual asbestos issues, that are 100% real.
And once again, I am not saying banning anti-vaxx is bad, vaccines are proven over and over again.
Lots of things that people say in opposition to vaccines is true, or at least has some basis in fact. Polio vaccines decades ago were contaminated with sv40, which does have the potential to cause tumors. (So there is "vaccines cause cancer!") There is also probably a real link between Guillain-Barre and vaccines, but there is also a link between any infection and Guillain-Barre, do with a vaccine you essne tidally keep the risk of that very rare syndrome and lose the risk of infection.
Vaccines are not risk-free, they just have such incredibly high value that the incredibly low risk is completely worth it.
> if we ban them, what are we banning them for?
"We" are not banning them. GoFundMe is.
Call it whatever you like. "Subverting public health," maybe.
I just can't understand why anyone would be in favor of corporations shutting down ALL dissenting speech on a particular topic on their platform. Perhaps the "anti-vaxxers" of today are 100% wrong about everything, but that doesn't mean that 100% of criticism of vaccines now and forever more is and will always be 100% invalid. Why would anyone think that?
Nobody is doing this, including GoFundMe. In fact there is quite a lot of active research into vaccines, both how to make them more effective and how to make them more safe. No one calls those people "anti-vaxxers." No one is piling into this thread to call tntn an "anti-vaxxer." Informed, rigorous consideration and investigation of vaccines is well-accepted by society and always will be.
What gets labeled as anti-vaxxer is the uninformed, or deliberately misinformed, content that is created to attract attention, for the purposes of monetizing said attention. Crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe, Patreon, etc. are some of the ways people make that business work.
Snake-oil salesman is an old scam: you create or feed public fear, then you sell a (fake) solution to that fear. Anti-vaxxers have adapted an advocacy model to this pursuit--they use vaccines to feed paranoia about society, then they ask for money to "continue the fight" or whatever. The entire operation is done in bad faith: a scam.
Given my above hypothetical situation—all current "anti-vaxxer" talking points are objectively false, but at some point in the future something happens that warrants objectively legitimate criticism of vaccines—do you really think many people who have been taught that "anti-vaxxers" are 100% wrong about 100% of what they say, 100% of the time, to the point where criticism is generally silenced or forced into the fringe, wouldn't say, "ah, looks like the anti-vaxxers are at it again!" People in this very thread are literally equating "anti-vaxxers" with literal terrorists. Do you think these people will ever be open to criticizing vaccines, given that they allow themselves to think in these terms?
I understand your concern, but context matters. A trained scientist conducting rigorous research is treated differently from a random person with a blog and a GoFundMe, even if the latter tries to hang their anti-vaccine hat on something the scientist says.