Anti-vaxxers get around Instagram’s new hashtag controls
rappler.com
rappler.com
Seriously, people will always find a way to say what they want to regardless of how hard you want them not to. Trying to cut someone's tongue out will only make them double down in their beliefs. Non-condescending truth and reason is the better route, most crusaders though have no idea how to be kind to those who disagree with them and do their positions regardless of validity a disservice.
No one ever listens to let alone agrees with the person yelling at them. Ever.
I really don't care that much about the current fanatics, I care about the next ones. (For example, you can have calm respecting discussions with some violent cult leader, but that does not mean that you allow her/him to give "cult devotion 101" lecture series at the local junior school)
"Why was the anti-vaxxer's two year old crying?"
"Midlife crisis."
Get the feeling many on all sides of every argument around still have no problem doing so.
Convincing others to change their views is difficult. Stopping an account from speaking anymore is trivially simple. The differential here leads down one path.
That's why advertisement doesn't work. Ever. /s
It really looks like the attempts at censorship have failed, and it doesn't look like it's working against disinformation. In fact, these people might (and probably do) feel that because they are being censored, they are actually right but the real conspirers are trying to suppress the truth.
As I said in another comment, you're utterly missing the point of efforts like this. Of course quarantining infected people doesn't cure them. But that's a different goal and requires different methods, and sometimes there may be no cure at all (or it might be very individualized, challenging and expensive, and thus hard to scale). The idea of a quarantine is to keep vulnerable new parts of the population from themselves being infected.
Another somewhat equivalent case would be security, which is always an economic equation. Security would be impossible against an omniscient omnipotent attacker, but in the real world there is no such thing. Everyone, even the biggest government entities, face resource constraints. So security is all about increase the resources needed by an attacker. Saying "oh putting a lock on the door doesn't keep someone from breaking a window!" is missing the point. It still increases the effort an attacker must go to, the risk they must take, and in turn the security.
Remember, the effective contact rate β is determined by multiplying the transmission risk p by the total contact rate γ.
β = γ*p
But even so, keeping the overall number of people harmed as low as possible is the ultimate goal. And while there is some margin for error, when the level of vaccination drops below herd immunity there can be a sharp, non-linear increase in harm. So while attempting engagement and changing of minds is something to pursue in parallel, it's also necessary to at least try to maintain the status quo in the mean time too.
Instagram’s efforts at banning hashtags are token at best when this account with 20k followers is found in under a minute from the #vaccine hashtag.
Read the comments on some of the posts for a fun time.
They could control this on their platform very straightforwardly if they wished to, and they are not doing so.
It seems to me they don’t get to have it both ways: they are censoring hashtags (unethical, as it is breaking search for their users and is quiet editorializing), but not censoring accounts that serve the same purpose. It’s a convenient way of keeping their numbers up while getting to pretend that they aren’t truly responsible for the content that appears on their own webpage. Don’t believe them. They are.
Ultimately they should either stop censoring their search engine, or ban all of these dumb motherfuckers who are creating a public health hazard. Anything else is just hypocrisy and lies.
Edit: here’s another one, over 40k followers.
Presumably they are doing this because of pressure from advertisers. I’m not sure why they care so much. I can somewhat understand why they care about YouTube, where their money (indirectly) goes to the creator making the content they disagree with, but on Instagram that isn’t the case.
WHY would anyone who is genuinely unsure and looking for information on vaccinations either search instagram or even make it there and be exposed to these hashtags. It's not exactly an information rich platform.
It seems like people who are already established in the anti vax movement would be the only ones following this hashtag. In that case, censoring these tags does seem like it's a bit over the top. While I believe they are wrong, people should be allowed to think what they want and even share it with others who are like minded.
I just don't buy the argument that this is in some way protecting people from being exposed to misinformation and is simply facebook 'vaxwashing' for feel good credibility.
However, in reality, it’s probably a gradual process of belief change or formation - people don’t move from slightly unsure to frothing-at-the-mouth anti-vaxxer overnight. And this sort of disinformation may well be accessed and become influential to people who are part-way through that process.
Because not everyone is personally information-rich. Just like back when large groups of people thought AOL was "the internet," there are people now who believe Facebook, or YouTube, or Instygram are "the internet." And those silos are their only source of information.
What are their alternatives, now that the internet has killed information?
Libraries are inconvenient (few locations, short hours; some of the libraries in my county are only open for a few hours two or three days a week). Outside of a few large cities, there is no more radio news. Quality TV news is hard to find. In large swaths of the United States there isn't a local newspaper anymore, and even if there was, you couldn't buy it (There must be 50 Starbucks in my city, but not one sells newspapers anymore. The other coffee shops followed suit. No papers at gas stations or supermarkets, either anymore. If you want a paper, you subscribe or go to the airport.)
The masses followed the information and their friends and ended up in social media hell. It's only natural for the organizations trying to target them to go there, as well.
To the first, the goal here is harm reduction in the form of the slowing the spread of infection, not a black and white magical changing of everyone's mind. No one has any illusions that existing anti-vaxxers will in any way be cured by steps like this, but the point is to reduce and slow the numbers of new people who will be infected by anti-vax thinking. Anti-vax thinking is like a disease itself, multiplying and spreading through regular human channels and exploiting our existing frameworks and thinking. Just as quarantines or vaccines themselves do not cure somebody who is already infected with a real world disease, quarantines and "vaccination" won't themselves cure somebody with corrupted thinking. But that doesn't mean they aren't useful tools, because real lives are on the line, and the system does have a certain amount of give and take in terms of what the critical level is for herd immunity (fortunately, since there will always be a small fraction of people with genuine medical issues like compromised immune systems). It's not necessary to keep everyone in the population vaccinating, with many it's only around 90-95%. It's understood that anti-vaxxers will mutate in response to new efforts to resist them, and in turn containment steps must also adapt. Nothing odd about that. It is and will always be a process as with many things in life.
Just as in the real world concentrated groupings of people, faster travel, and faster shipping systems can accelerate the spread of existing and new strains, social media which brings together many people and accelerates their exchanges could also be a vector. Success for any given effort comes from how much is slows things down for a time, that's all.
To the second, for various reasons many people have gotten the odd notion in their minds that "Free Speech" is about ideas being equal, or about it being free. It isn't, and never was. Quite the contrary, free speech is important precisely because ideas are not equal, and in fact most of them are trash. The goal is to try to make a process that, over long periods of time, will tend to eventually sift out better ideas and adapt to changing conditions that make older discarded ideas worthy of consideration again. Further, centralized power inevitably faces pressure to crystalize and serve smaller interests. So if the coercive centralized physical power of government (or equivalent entities) is used to control actual thoughts and expressions, the result long term has tended to be poor.
However, that very much does not apply to social pressure, or to whether individual private people/entities choose to associate with given ideas and/or lend them their own private economic support. Not doing so is a critical part of Free Speech as well. If somebody thinks ideas are truly awful, they can and should deny any support, lobby others to deny support, ostracize those with such ideas, etc. Fighting such pressure and bearing the consequences is itself part of the gauntlet that ideas must face, and always have faced. None of this is new. People have the right to go create their own services, groups, and put their own soap boxes out, but others have the equal right to have nothing to do with them. The arguments back and forth are at the heart of the process, and the process is never, ever done.
Of course, that argument can be used to justify "quarantining" (i.e. silencing) literally any group based on what definition of "harm" is being used, and therefore is null and void. Better hope society never changes so that your beliefs are unpopular.
Moreover, as the article demonstrates, "quarantining" doesn't even work. A lot of rights we enjoy today came about because the backers of the status quo were unable to suppress the popular movements that back them despite keeping them out of the press and broadcast media as much as they could.
Indeed it can, welcome to Free Speech. The whole point though is that those that believe in the idea are also free to keep arguing for it, and to keep the flame alive, and if it has merit they will ultimately be able to convince society to change its mind. That might well take years or even decades
>Better hope society never changes so that your beliefs are unpopular.
This is the sort of lazy, passive thinking that is the source of much of the problem people have understanding this. There is no "hope" in free speech, only effort, forever, with no guarantees of success. Because there is no trustable guiding oracle, that's the whole issue and always has been. It's turtles all the way down.
>Moreover, as the article demonstrates, "quarantining" doesn't even work.
The article demonstrates no such thing. In fact, you yourself are being self-contradictory right here! If you actually thought it didn't work, why would you even care at all? You can't BOTH claim that private entities exercising their freedom of association and refusing to support ideas they believe wrong is a threat, which you do, AND claim that it doesn't do anything. It's one or the other.
>A lot of rights we enjoy today came about because the backers of the status quo were unable to suppress the popular movements that back them despite keeping them out of the press and broadcast media as much as they could.
A lot of the rights we enjoy today came about because those against the status quo very much struggled against the sensibilities of the mainstream through enormous, sustained effort. Not because they were handed over control of whatever media they wanted. Being banned from social media or not being offered your own column in a newspaper or whatever else doesn't stop you from working to get your message out in other ways.
People like you love to CLAIM you want freedom of speech and association, but inevitably you only want it for yourselves.
It seems like questions like these are under self censorship in the scientific community these days, perhaps in fear that allowing their validity might encourage parents not to vaccinate their kids. But shutting them out of scientific discourse only drives them underground.
Also, extremely rarely, someone's immune system can react rather badly to a vaccine. It's also possible to be allergic to one of the ingredients in the vaccine.
Those are scientifically understood and accepted risks. With the limitations of with epidemiological studies, and difficulty associated with replicating vaccine studies in any other way, it's hard to justify the level of certainty I see in the scientific community.
There is also a lot of pressure on the Facebooks and Googles of the world to censor things. Politicians and traditional media are the big abusers here (and it always feels like it's motivated by self-interest rather than the greater good). I think these companies should push back, and they probably want to (it's expensive to be the police), but when Congress threatens to investigate, what choice do you have but to do what they say? It's unconstitutional to make a law about what you can and can't say on the Internet, but it's not unconstitutional to say "hey, maybe censor some stuff and we won't look too hard into what taxes you're paying".
I have a surefire solution to the problems of fake news, anti-vaxxing, etc. Give every American a world-class science education for free, and this problem solves itself in a generation. Nobody wants to pay for that, though, so instead we blame Instagram. It's cheaper and we feel like we're doing something.
I don't think that's true. In fact there are various categories of speech that aren't protected and the category of false medical claims appears to be in a grey area.
Look, I don't want to defend these people, but any limitations on the first amendment are not what's going to bring this movement to an end.
Interestingly, the precedent-setting case was with a guy distributing pamphlets persuading people not to enlist for WW1 which doesn't seem remotely close to any of these scenarios.
The real reason why it's a moot point, though, is that no government would have the political will to legislate on something as divisive as this.
https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-vax-movement-russian-troll...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/meet-the-new-york-couple-d...
The source is the Russian government. So what exactly do you mean by "handling" the source? Overthrowing the Russian government? Cutting Russia off from the internet?
Are we also to believe that this is some long running conspiracy the Russians have been executing since the 19th century when people began opposing vaccinations?
Not just vax. It's well established who is participating and that it's an overt, broad disinformation campaign against everything from politics to flat earth.
Any and all chaos in the West benefits Putin. Read some of Garry Kasparov's writings for a more inside view.
Yes, this runs contrary to the US dogma of "free speech", but anti-vaxxers are murderers-to-be. You're not gonna get rid of them by playing whack-a-mole with hashtags or banning them, you're only gonna get rid of them by locking them up.