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from the even-my-parent's-VCR-clock-is-right-once-a-day dept.
Channels like VAXXED TV, LarryCook333, iHealthTube, and other anti-vaccination channels on YouTube have been seeing their videos demonetized starting Friday.
“We have strict policies that govern what videos we allow ads to appear on, and videos that promote anti-vaccination content are a violation of those policies”
the policy referenced by YouTube states:
Harmful or dangerous acts
Video content that promotes harmful or dangerous acts that result in serious physical, emotional, or psychological injury is not suitable for advertising. Some examples include videos depicting painful or invasive surgical or cosmetic procedures, or pranks involving sexual harassment or humiliation.
According to YouTube, this includes anti-vaxxer content.
Youtube has also introduced an information panel pertaining to vaccines. Looking through some anti-vax channels, the following text and link is displayed below anti-vax videos:
Vaccine controversies
Vaccine hesitancy, a reluctance or refusal to vaccinate or have one's children vaccinated, has been identified by the World Health Organization as one of the top ten global health threats of 2019.[1][2] Hesitancy results from public debates around the medical, ethical and legal issues related to vaccines.
Wikipedia
Most may agree with the target of these actions (particularly with measles making a tragic comeback in the U.S. due to loss of herd immunity resulting from reduced vaccination rates), but the process still has those 'unaccountable', 'untransparent', 'arbitrary', 'unappealable' characteristics that have become the norm with large social media providers.
Pinterest is also taking measures to reduce the spread of anti-vax propaganda on its platform
So how exactly is Pinterest doing this? By blacklisting search terms like “vaccines” from the platform, along with sites that spread this sort of health misinformation.
Additional coverage of anti-vax demonitization Here and here
A sampling of previous coverage of the 'vaccine controversy' on SoylentNews here and here
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @08:50AM (4 children)
I have also found a few papers which prove that filter cigarettes allow to fight lots of lung diseases as they disinfect the respiratory tract. These are a legit articles in a well-cited scientific journals. Maybe smoking near children or making our children smoke should also be considered healthy and non-smoking as a criminal act?
In 1970s and 80s there were really violent moves towards tobacco manufacturers to make them release their methodology, and it was found that cigarettes are bad, make people die, make children get autism (or sth like this) and cows give spoiled milk ;). The violence of these moves can be validated by seeing that in some countries there were no cigarettes available at all in shops for a few months!
Meanwhile, I still try to debunk the vaccine heavy metals hypothesis and no manufacturer ever released production details which allow to validate that in reactors used there is no chance that e.g. this lead-based gasket forgotten years ago is not in contact with product.
There are lots of meaningless, non law-binding BS like "good practices" or apparent lies like "Our goal is high quality"... The goal is in your business plans morons! They literally say "We want you not to think about it". This is a level of typical street drugs.
So now YT demonetizes anti-vaccine videos. Then, in USA, it will come to Democrats or Republicans, depending on who bribes better. In EU the thing may be about Article 13. Or maybe about products reviews if it is not so good as seller wants.
Then maybe people will realize that by giving up their publishing possibilities to "platforms" instead of their Internet access services, they lost nearly all abilities to publish on the Internet if they are not a big business. And then it will be too late.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @04:53PM (3 children)
You are an intelligent person. You should know that there's a world of difference between a handful of papers from the 1970s showing an a questionable result, and the long term, well known, nearly 200 year track record on something like vaccines.
We started mandating vaccination, childhood illnesses all but disappeared. In countries where they do not have access to vaccines, the children suffer at rates to be expected from not being vaccinated, so we aren't talking a mutation that somehow rendered the disease inert, nor a hereditary gene in humans somehow making people less susceptible. Use Occam's razor here. There is no doubt that vaccination works and it prevents some really horrible shit from happening to innocent kids who cannot protect themselves.
Yet some uneducated, money grubbing morons on the internet convince a substantial subset of the population to stop vaccinating so they can sell you books and miracle cures and suddenly these diseases become resurgent.
This isn't a just a cough or a cold guys. These are real diseases that will make your kids sick. At best you are debilitating the child for life, at worst you are murdering your child by withholding from them a life saving medicine.
If you're worried about quality control then pass laws to tighten quality controls and no, the manufacturers should not be protected from lawsuits, but the standard of proof needs to be much higher as in "I vaccinated my child against X, they got X anyways, here's the coroner's report".
The same should be true of anyone spreading anti-vaxxer nonsense. They should be held criminally and civilly liable for every kid who got sick because of their nonsense. It should be exactly the same as withholding any life saving medicine from your child, such as insulin or albuterol and the people spreading this nonsense need to be charged with practicing medicine without a license in addition to child abuse and neglect or each sick child of some poor parent who was not intelligent enough to realize they were being taken advantage of by fraudsters. Each anti-vax group should be required to pay the medical bills for each child who got sick because their parents were too dumb not to listen to their blithering nonsense. Make this painful, make this hurt, make it criminal in the worst possible way, just like we do for any other form of child abuse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @06:12PM (1 child)
Uneducated? no, well, not all of them, some of them know *exactly* what they're doing
dangerously unscrupulous? yes, fuck yes...
And yet, sitting beside me as I type this, is someone who is deaf in one ear as a result of childhood measles over 50 years ago, despite having been vaccinated.
That's a problem here as well, having been promised magical 'silver bullets', it's very hard for parents to accept as an excuse 'sorry, that's the way the dice roll...shit happens' (no matter how nicely it's couched in medical terminology) in that Nth percentage of cases where these bullets fail to kill the werewolf.
To paraphrase the way someone put it in one of the previous discussions here, the goal of mass vaccination programs isn't really about protecting the health of any specific individual as such, but that of the herd in general, people need to be told up front that in these cases, shit will indeed happen to an unlucky percentage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @08:04PM
Let me put it this way. Your friend is deaf in one ear because he got measles despite being vaccinated, but that is not the whole story.
Vaccination does not work to "completely stop you from ever getting the disease". No one in their right mind should even think of it that way.
A vaccine works by giving your body pre-warning that something nasty is coming, and this gives your body a head start on figuring out how to deal with it thereby lessening the effects dramatically.
You blaming vaccines for your friend being deaf is the same as blaming seatbelts because, despite wearing the seatbelt properly you were injured in a high speed collision. The seatbelt prevented something far worse from happening. The vaccine did as well. Don't believe me? 900 unvaccinated kids just died in Madagascar https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/02/25/measles-outbreak-900-dead-madagascar-could-happen-u-s/2977595002/ [usatoday.com] and 130 died in the Phillipines https://boingboing.net/2019/02/19/measles-kills-130-in-the-phili.html [boingboing.net] This shit is deadly and killing innocents in countries where access to vaccines is limited.
Oddly it is at least a misdemeanor in most states not to buckle up your child, and it is a felony in 5 states.
https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/laws/safetybeltuse/mapbeltenforcement [iihs.org]
Isn't it odd that every argument against vaccination can be made against seatbelts and child car seats, yet you do not see people in their right mind running around with their kids unbuckled and encouraging others to do the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @09:45PM
i would beat you to death in 5 minutes.