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Pinterest Cracks Down on Anti-Vaxxers, Pressuring Facebook To Follow (cnbc.com)
Social network Pinterest has taken a big step to stop the spread of false content that is damaging people's health, which could put pressure on competitors to follow. From a report: Pinterest said Wednesday that it would no longer return any search results, including pins and boards, for terms related to vaccinations, whether in favor or against them. It took that step in late 2018 after noticing that the majority of shared images on Pinterest cautioned people against vaccinations, despite medical guidelines demonstrating that most vaccines are safe for most people. Pinterest told CNBC on Wednesday that it's been hard to remove this anti-vaccination content entirely, so it put the ban in place until it can figure out a more permanent strategy. It's working with health experts including doctors, as well as the social media analysis company called Storyful to come up with a better solution, the company said.
People aren't going on Pintrest to search for vaccines to learn and make a reasoned argument. The problem is they find it organically and get sucked in.
If people wanted to search for information, they would use Google.
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for advertisers.
During the election when all that fake news was going around somebody interviewed the sys admin of one of the bigger networks. He was just in it for the ad revenue (and racking in a ton).
He was asked why he targeted the folks he did. It came down to certain groups of people would share and spread his crap, while other groups would debunk it instantly and it wouldn't get very far.
Anti-Vaxxers are like that. They'll spread your nonsense because they're already prepared to believe nonsense.
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Look, I'm not only in favour of vaccinations, I need people to have them myself, because I'm immuno-compromised. These kinds of measures, however, are not helpful. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and by censoring this discussion you're only going to create a situation where these people are all the more staunchly against it, and create sympathy for them from individuals who value civil liberties. By the by, I would say this is an attempt to create a further propaganda instrument, dressed up in an argument for censorship that looks appealing. As Picard said in Drumhead, "Those whom cloak themselves in good intentions, are well-camouflaged."
When will be stop "cracking down" on what is ok to say and not?
Why would we stop cracking down on stupid, incorrect, dangerous information? As long as it's not the government inhibiting your right to say it, how could you possibly have a problem with public and private entities of society trying to downplay bad information and promote good information? You'd have to be utterly ignorant of history to think good information magically bubbles up simply by inherent quality.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I also don't think that social pressure like this changes any minds. We should actually reason with people/explain the position on how vaccines save lives and what controls there are if something goes wrong with a vaccine. It's true, they're not perfect, but they're a lot better than the diseases they replace. We wiped out Polio.
It's stupid to try to beat people into believing something like this when they have a mix of real concerns and bad information, instead we should point out that we know the faults, we have a way of handling things, and we're trying to make them better and that we don't just rely on the say-so of random drug companies.
But I think the jihad against anti-vaxxers does more harm than good. Instead, we should help people get vaccinations and help them learn why we promote them so that it's safe to change their minds, rather than trying to make them feel under attack.
Yes, it's stupid and harmful, but they're people who don't know any better and this sort of reaction is also harmful.
This is how society loses its freedom of speech.
Oh bullshit. A private company squashing factually wrong information that results in people becoming sick and dying is hardly a slippery slope to the elimination of free speech. Anti-vaxxers are the slow equivalent of people shouting fire in a movie theater. They are causing needless panic and should be liable for the harm the lies they spread cause.
Sure it's just pintrest and possibly facebook; but what if google decided to weigh in with their opinon on the matter?
I hope they do. Anti-vaxxers are hurting people and it needs to stop as soon as possible.
The slippery slope might be a fallacious argument, but it's not always wrong.
It's definitely wrong in this case.
How? How is someone who isn't vaccinated harmful to someone who is? Isn't that the whole point of vaccinations? Or, do they not work?
Vaccinations work, but they are not 100% effective. An important measure of infectious diseases is the basic reproduction number, or R-nought. This represents the average number of infections that one sick person will create. Suppose mumps has an R-nought of 5, and you have a vaccine with 90% effectiveness, then the effective R-nought, after vaccination, is 0.5.
The critical point is an R-nought of 1. If you get below that, the diseases is expected to die out over time. If it is higher, then the disease is expected to grow. Getting the value from 5 to 0.5 will make a huge difference, which you would get if everybody is vaccinated. If too few people are vaccinated, R-nought will grow, and disease can spread, and will also infect 10% of the vaccinated population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Who decides what information is good then? Think for one second.
Scientists and doctors backed up by appropriate government agencies staffed by experts in the field. This question is EXACTLY why we have the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, etc. It's their mission to prevent quackery and they do it very well. Pretending that nobody is worthy to decide what is good data is idiotic.
I'm vaccinated, I have two 1y grandkids not through the regimen yet. Until then THEY are susceptible to any mobile Petri dish who's sure their opinions trump a century of factual data on vaccine efficacy. I'm not quite to the age range yet where my immune system will start ramping down regardless of what vaccinations I've had; then *I'm* vulnerable. Some people have naturally weak immune systems and vaccines "don't take"; THEY'RE vulnerable. Part of the "social contract" if you will, is helping protect your neighbors, Vaccinating to avoid the chance of passing some damaging disease to them is part of the deal. The people who skip assuming The Other Guy will get THEIR kids covered and protect their Special Snowflake are the worst sort of societal leeches.
Oh YOU're the one who knows someone harmed by vaccines!
Hey, folks, we found the guy!
Great. Want to go back a few years and discuss whether a polio vaccine could potentially be a good thing? Maybe in an Iron Lung ward?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.