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Title: As anti-vax movement gets weirder - and dumber - Facebook announces crackdown
Source:
ArsTechnica
URL Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/201 ... -facebook-announces-crackdown/
Published: Mar 11, 2019
Author: Beth Mole
Post Date: 2019-03-11 10:02:49 by Tooconservative
Keywords: None
Views: 12789
Comments: 59
Facing scrutiny for allowing anti-vaccine lies and conspiracy theories to fester and spread on its pages, Facebook announced Thursday a set of steps it will take to rid its platform of misinformation—which has seemingly become even weirder and more idiotic recently. The move follows a letter sent to Facebook from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) last month, raising concerns that anti-vaccine information spread on the site could corrupt anxious parents’ views of safe, life-saving immunizations. Schiff also questioned the popular social media site about accepting payments from anti-vaccine advertisements. Facebook wasn’t the only media giant questioned; Schiff sent a similar letter to Google, too, raising concerns about content on YouTube specifically. Still, Facebook has taken center stage on the issue. In a Senate hearing last week exploring the rise of misinformation about vaccines (titled Vaccines Save Lives), a now-high-profile Ohio teenager made a point to single out the site. Ethan Lindenberger, the 18-year-old who famously got himself vaccinated despite his mother being fiercely against vaccines, said his mother’s false beliefs came from one place: Facebook. When a Senator asked Lindenberger where he got his information on vaccines, Lindenberger, chuckling, responded, “not Facebook.” “From CDC, World Health Organization, scientific journals… accredited sources,” he added. With the steps outlined Thursday, Facebook aims to inject some of those credible sources into its platform. Broadly, the social media giant will try to boost the profile of accurate, authoritative information on vaccines while thwarting the spread of pre-identified vaccine misinformation in news feeds and recommendations. It will also boot ads with that misinformation. To identify just what is false and what is credible, Facebook said it will rely on the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to pick out what it referred to as “vaccine hoaxes.“ “If these vaccine hoaxes appear on Facebook, we will take action against them,” the company said. It offered an example of planned actions, saying that “if a group or Page admin posts this vaccine misinformation, we will exclude the entire group or Page from recommendations, reduce these groups and Pages' distribution in News Feed and Search, and reject ads with this misinformation.” The success of the stated plan may hinge on whether the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can keep up with the ever-shifting conspiracy theories and bunkum related to vaccines. The noxious yet established falsehood that vaccines or vaccine components can cause autism, for instance, has been widely debunked. But others are burgeoning and may be hard to head off. For instance, there's the myth that vaccines are cash cows for Big Pharma (they make relatively little revenue), which is secretly behind pro-vaccine messages (they’re not; public health experts are). More recently, a theme that has been volleyed by anti-vaccine advocates is that getting measles is somehow good for you and could prevent cancer. Both are completely wrong. Measles is a serious illness that can cause severe disabilities in children, including deafness and intellectual disabilities. It is also deadly. An ongoing measles outbreak in Madagascar, for instance, has killed nearly 1,000 children. Being dead isn’t good for you. The idea circulating that measles can prevent cancer may stem from a misunderstanding of studies that used bioengineered versions of the virus to deliver cancer therapies. But these are not the viruses that circulate during outbreaks. There is no credible evidence to suggest that previous measles infections will protect a person from cancers. Last, in an even more idiotic turn, a Texas lawmaker argued that he was not worried about measles because, in the US, we have “antibiotics and that kind of stuff.” Antibiotics only treat bacterial infections. Measles is caused by a virus. Moreover, there is no specific antiviral treatment for measles. Due in large part to this kind of misinformation spreading, the US is now battling six separate measles outbreaks and has confirmed cases in 11 states so far this year. Amid an outbreak in Washington state, more than 800 potentially exposed children have been barred from schools.
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#4. To: Tooconservative (#0)
It appears there have been actual cases of severe and virtually permanent injury from vaccines, and that the vaccine industry has intentionally avoided publication of these incidents, perhaps for profit motivations, or perhaps to avoid discouraging parents from vaccinating their kids out of an honest interest in promoting vaccinations as a *statistical* wise choice in spite of the fact that they are not 100% safe. In one case, a family of triplets claim all of them had "switched off" into apparent autistism within 12 hours of all getting the same vaccine. They claim the vaccine was later recalled as contaminated, but they only found that out many years later when a doctor friend knew enough to look up the lot/batch number. If it is the case where the vaccine producers and the established & mainstream & professional medical community is withholding information from these parents after a recall on a vaccine, how can they be trusted when they claim vaccines are safe? Like with politics, there is simply too much power, to much money behind the industry to accept the word of even the CDC (which I think is a private entity), and now facebook, which is a huge corporate entity. Have we reached the stage where freedom of speech cannot be tolerated for the good of the American people?
Contaminated vaccines have been a periodic problem over the years, there is no denying it. That is not a reason to discontinue vaccination for public health. There is very little profit in these common vaccines. If they could get away with it, I think Big Pharma would discontinue them altogether. Big Pharma is greedy and loves its profits but vaccines like these common ones are not profit centers for their business. It also can expose them to vast legal liabilities, such as in the case you cited above.
That is not a reason to discontinue vaccination for public health. You sound rather dismissive of the overwhelming injury that at least a few families have suffered because of vaccines. Then why wouldn't the families such as the one I cited NOT have been informed about the contaminated one their kids received? What was the motivation? Or was it simply incompetence?
#29. To: Pinguinite (#26)
Probably because no one advertises information that will get their asses sued off in court and subject them to hundreds of thousands in court costs and settlements. No one likes to be sued.
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#5. To: Pinguinite (#4)
In one case, a family of triplets claim all of them had "switched off" into apparent autistism within 12 hours of all getting the same vaccine. They claim the vaccine was later recalled as contaminated, but they only found that out many years later when a doctor friend knew enough to look up the lot/batch number.
and that the vaccine industry has intentionally avoided publication of these incidents, perhaps for profit motivations,
#26. To: Tooconservative (#5)
Contaminated vaccines have been a periodic problem over the years, there is no denying it.
Big Pharma is greedy and loves its profits but vaccines like these common ones are not profit centers for their business. It also can expose them to vast legal liabilities, such as in the case you cited above.
Replies to Comment # 26. Then why wouldn't the families such as the one I cited NOT have been informed about the contaminated one their kids received? What was the motivation? Or was it simply incompetence?
End Trace Mode for Comment # 26.
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