I've known this was going on for a long time, and know of a number of influencers of various kinds that I'm certain are enemy action. This stuff has been happening and is still happening. This is relevant.
But it is important and it is time we stopped pretending it isn't.
Anonymous entities paying to spread disinformation or even unnecessary confusion about vaccines should be viewed first and foremost as attempting to keep vaccination rates lower in the places where this is happening.
And then one should ask "who would want to do this? why?". And one likely won't be far wrong if one assumes the worst.
Twisting facts is a neat trick, but ensuring people never read anything else is the real magic here imo
Hence this story. This is what goes on.
Cries of 'censorship! Stop censoring my right to this pro-disease opinion!' combined with more furtive but heavyhanded censoring of shall we say alternate motivations for the 'censored' opinions that must be, yea must be heard in the free marketplace of ideas.
It's not magic. It's dead simple on Reddit and places like that: brigade things with downvotes. On twitter, some voices get such a height of harassment that it's pretty much impossible to continue. Apparently on Hacker News, content gets watched very closely so it can be stifled at birth in natural-looking ways, since raw brigading would likely be too obvious.