Facebook Said It’d Stop Covid Anti-Vaxxers, but It’s Letting Them Run Wild | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Said It’d Stop Covid Anti-Vaxxers, but It’s Letting Them Run Wild

vice.com

14 pointselorant12 comments

Why would it stop them? A horde of idiots who spend hours arguing and doing "research" are a great source of engagement and advertisers are happy to pay money to reach this target market.

Facebook should stay out of policing speech.

Let people write nonsense on Facebook, including nonsense about vaccines, and let other people rebut them. Silencing a type of nonsense leads believers to think that there is a conspiracy to suppress the truth.

That nonsense leads to people dying.

If we believe some nonsense leads to people dying, then we should consider that trying to censor the nonsense might bolster its support, leading to more people dying

That's not a realistic view of what happens. When someone posts nonsense about vaccines the following can happen:

- they get some rebuttal

- they get only likes because all their friends agree

- they get only likes because their friends don't care to get in a fight on the internet

With time, option 3 leads to muting/blocking/unfriending which leads to option 2. In this case letting the conspiracy continue literally converts into potential deaths though, so it's more dangerous than your typical "5g controls your brain" people.

On the contrary: it's what has already happened. Do you know there is a MASSIVE difference between someone who is skeptical about the safety of one type of vaccine versus someone who is an "anti-vaxxer"? Social (and mainstream) media only present two options: people who are totally for any and all vaccines (trust science!) versus people who are against all vaccines all the time, no argument, no quarter.

There is a wide, varied, and rich spectrum between the two officially acknowledged viewpoints so I would say Facebook is doing it's job to the letter: to polarize the topic into two, discreet, non-overlapping camps: those who are for and hate the antis, and those who are against and hate the pros.

(And, sadly, this is true of Facebook on a wide range of issues, not just vaccines... when is the last time anyone had a civil debate about anything on FB?)

I know they exist and I'm ignoring them in this case. Actually curious people who are on the fence will have potentially interesting chats and would not be classified as misinformation.

Thats not what happened on Yourube. Just mentioning the pandemic at all even in passing was getting people banned for months.

Exactly, YouTube censored the panel of academics speaking with Gov. DeSantis.

You can disagree with them politically or even just substantively, but holy smokes is it infuriating to see credentialed and serious academics being deplatformed for being perceived to have broken with supposed orthodoxy.

YouTube is a different case. They had a policy of "don't mention covid" and executed it. The context here is straight up misinformation.

Perhaps if Facebook detects a post about vaccines (or other similar topics) they should allow friends to make comments anonymously on that post.

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