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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 17 2019, @03:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the It-is-SO-GOOD-"they"-are-afraid-to-let-us-tell-you-about-it! dept.

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Peddlers of Medical Misinformation Are Using Social Media 'Censorship' as a Selling Point

Speech OnlineSpeech OnlineThis week, we're looking at the state of free speech on the internet, how we got here, and where we're going.  

No one has ever accused Mike Adams, the self-proclaimed Health Ranger, of being an understated guy, but recent events have taken him to new, shouty heights. After Adams' website, Natural News, had its page suspended by Facebook in June for violating the company's spam policies, Adams likened the suspension to genocide and said President Trump should use the military, if necessary, to break up tech companies. But Adams—and other peddlers of medical misinformation, including many anti-vaccine personalities—are also working hard to make their supposed muzzling by social media companies into a selling point and a profit-driver.

In an email blast on June 30, Adams accused Google of gaming search results to "to defame and attack all natural health topics, all while banning natural health websites from its search results." He added that the search engine giant "has gone all-in with Monsanto, Big Pharma, chemotherapy, pesticides, 5G, geoengineering, fluoride and every other poison you can imagine."

And then, naturally, he turned around and offered to sell his audience the supplements So Powerful That Google Is Trying to Hide Them (emphasis his):

P.S. Despite Google's malicious attacks on health and nutrition, the truth is that nutritional supplements works. For the next day or so, we've got an event running on PQQ, CoQ10 and other specialty supplements that dramatically increase your intake of cell-supporting nutrients (including brain-supporting nutrients). Check out the details here.

It is emblematic of the strange moment we've arrived at in the selling of misinformation online, particularly the medical variety. In recent months, several social media giants have announced their intention to crack down on that misinformation, including most particularly anti-vaccine content. (Pinterest made the "vaccine" hashtag literally impossible to search for since virtually every search resultshowed up anti-vax content.)

But the process has been late, slow, and inconsistent. Take Instagram, which banned some anti-vaccine hashtags in March, but left others alone. Today, some of those banned hashtags, like #vaccineskill, have made a noticeable comeback, and there are anti-vaccine accounts aplenty, including Vaccine Truth,which has 60,000 followers. Or take the lively world of fake cancer cures: theWall Street Journalrecently noted that YouTube and Facebook are still overrun with the same fake cancer treatments that have been circulating online for years. That includes black salve, a longtime faux treatment for skin cancer that in actuality just burns skin away without killing cancer growths, and the entire opus of Robert O. Young, who promotes things like juicing regimens and "alkaline infusions" to cure cancer, infusions that critics say are functionally just injections of a baking soda cocktail. Young went to prison in 2017 for practicing medicine without a license, and he was ordered to pay over $100 million in a civil lawsuit filed against him by a terminal cancer patient who'd used his treatments the following year. Yet he's back on Facebook and busily selling his products through a network of interconnected pages.

In other words, the social media companies' supposed "crackdown" has been bizarre, partial, and in some cases, not permanent. The entire muddled process has certainly complicated business for people who make a living selling misinformation. But it's also given them a recognizable new selling point, a way to claim to the audience they still very much have on these same social media platforms that their ideas simply must work, which is why Big Government and Big Pharma are trying to muzzle them.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Wednesday July 17 2019, @08:27AM (3 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 17 2019, @08:27AM (#867910) Journal

    As a leftist, I'm shocked and disgusted. to see people who pretend to be leftists endorsing this narrative.

    How you are leaning is equally irrelevant. Until a court or the legislators decide otherwise, this is how it is. The most recent decision [soylentnews.org] on the matter specifically refused to "consider whether private social media companies are bound by the First Amendment when policing their platforms."

    Disgusted or not, you do accept the laws of the land as the rules to govern the society you live in, aren't you?

    Google is a private company that was built on communally funded infrastructure.

    They are still using computers that paid for, and energy they are paying for and the work of tens/hundred of thousands of employees they pay salary for and they do pay taxes to maintain that infrastructure (even if they try to avoid them as much as possible)
    Point: they are not using exclusively that public infrastructure that you mention.

    The internet

    As it is the case for many other companies. Are you objecting, for example, to the right of states to ask the sale tax from Amazon because the business is conducted over internet (and the delivery is performed using roads paid from public funds)?
    If yes, are you so left leaning to go full-throttle and say "whenever a business uses any public infrastruicture, no matter how infinitesimal, they must deliver their services on the basis of 'use according to your needs, pay according to you ability'" or something [wikipedia.org]?

    Built at taxpayers expense and essentially forced on massive populations that had no desire for it.

    Oh really? I guess those taxpayers don't derive any benefit in using this public infrastructure now, or what?

    We have testimony in courts and in the very House of Representatives as to how these companies have wound up holding what amounts to the public square, with significant effects on our elections.

    You run out of "internet public square" or what?
    It's not like the Internet bandwidth is choke full so that's the reason you can't find yourself a way express your voice and must ask google to cut you a slice from theirs.

    If that's the case then they are no more private than the local utility companies are.

    Really? Seems that I remember how the 4chan, 8chan and gab services do exist in the same internet space and the Internet didn't burst at the seams.

    But maybe it's the "public attention" the limited resource that you want a bigger chunk of (and not the access to Internet)?
    If so, tough luck, I can't remember any democratic law governing what the public must or must not pay attention to (even if I remember times when listening to "Voice of America" could have landed me in jail, but it was under a communist regime in East Europe, some almost 30 years ago).

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @06:05PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @06:05PM (#868126)

    I just don't understand why some people who are otherwise on the left suddenly become hardcore free marketeers when it comes to corporations censoring people on near-monopolistic platforms, when in almost every other instance they profess skepticism of corporations. These corporations are not your friends, and they are not just censoring right-wing people (despite right-wingers pretending that that is so). Youtube, for example, is screwing over nearly all forms of independent media, including the likes of Kyle Kulinski and David Pakman, who are obviously not right-wing. The only saving grace so far is that independent media hasn't been outright censored on the platform in general, but what it does show (yet again) is that corporations are not on the side of ordinary people and value money above all else. They don't care if you're left-wing or not, so stop with the free market extremism on this matter and wake up to the fact that when giant platforms like Google, Youtube, and Facebook use censorship or biased algorithms to promote propaganda news outlets, it has negative externalities on the rest of society.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @07:37PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @07:37PM (#868177)

      They are authoritarians.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 17 2019, @10:24PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 17 2019, @10:24PM (#868245) Journal

      I just don't understand why some people who are otherwise on the left suddenly become hardcore free marketeers when it comes to corporations censoring people on near-monopolistic platforms

      Because their rights are your rights too. If the state can force them to do things contrary to their private interest, the state can force you too.
      Careful what you wish for.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford