The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot | Hacker News Reader

The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot

bbc.co.uk

39 pointscommoner39 comments

I don't think you can call this anti-vax when when the ask was to favor one vaccine over another.

It can still be, specially if the favored one is less available. Having people become picky is one plausible method to slow immunization.

It also propagates the notion that vaccines in general are more dangerous than they really are.

Ok, but the headline makes it seem like it definitely was, when there's clearly room for interpretation.

Why this needs to be about anti-vax, as a company it is common to hire influencers to bad-mouth your competitors, could it a be campaign from a vaccine manufacturer?

Agreed, sounded like a tactic to make AZ look better in comparison. Maybe someone bought their stock on the cheap.

Even if the story is fake, it tells how the sausage is made: 2k usd and a twitter "influencer" with 1.5M subscribers will push almost any bs you want.

> death rate among people who had the Pfizer vaccine was almost three times that of the AstraZeneca jab.

Why not someone shorting Pfizer, rather than Russia?

It's very amature-ish, Russia would know it would get exposed, but did it anyway? Russia is good at this.

Also why France and Germany? English speaking influencers will flow to Europe, but not so much the other way.

> The story was genuine

> The story was genuine, but didn't include anything about vaccine deaths. But in this context it would give the false impression that the death rate statistics had come from the leak.

How did this get to #4 on the homepage with only 6 upvotes at the time? That seems almost impossible without manipulation.

Do you ask the same questions when the same thing happens with pro-Ivermectin articles?

I'm not talking about the content of the article at all. I'm just talking meta about how that seems impossible. #4 position with 6 upvotes seems impossible, but maybe I'm wrong and somehow it's was just the most disproportionate upvote-rank ratio I've seen yet.

For those downvoting, it's not the article. Can one not question the meta aspects about an article's ranking for clarification? I did not mean to imply any foul play.

I suspect HN has weights for popular words, e.g. "YouTube" gives +5, "anti-vax" gives -15 and so on.

It's currently 14 votes and 31 minutes old (and fallen to spot 5). So 6 and call it what, 15±5? Neither is at all unusual. Being quickly voted on is worth more (in terms of the ranking) than the same handful of votes over hours or days.

It's not unusual, HN's front page ranking algorithm is heavily biased towards new submissions.

Makes sense. It's just that #4 position with 6 upvotes is the most extreme ratio I've seen yet. When I said that it seemed impossible without manipulation (on a post now flagged), I did not mean that manipulation was happening, just that this seemed unusual.

You didn’t mean it was happening, but saying that it’s “almost impossible” that it isn’t happening doesn’t come across as moderate as you might have intended.

Exactly.

That's why I said that it seems almost impossible... but that's not very clear or moderate over text, my bad.

Dang has a post about front page dynamics…somewhere on here.

I've looked at the data; it was perfectly normal. This kind of thing happens all the time. It just stands out more when the topic is eye-catching or indignation-inducing.

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