Free speech is there exactly to protect minority opinions because sometimes it happens people in minority are right.
Every major movement started as minority, by definition. Free speech protection is there to make sure we can have smart people notice a problem and then express their concern and be allowed to voice it so that if they can gather enough movement to make a change there can be a good change.
It is sad that this can sometimes lead to aberrations like anti-vac movement but it would be a horrible idea to argue this is a reason to throw free speech protection out. Instead we should demand lawmakers to grow a spine and recognize there is no basis for anti-vac movement and enough is enough. Sadly, vote counting is much more important nowadays than sound medical advice.
Youtube is a not a public institution nor is it public land or space. Google can allow, or deny, whomever or whatever they want on their platform so long as their motivates for denying service are not due to regulated prejudice such as racism or sexism.
At some point a private company that allows you to post amateurish videos or 140 character messages becomes public utility used by millions and if they decide not to allow you to express your opinion your opinion becomes effectively unavailable to others.
I would absolutely love for the top ~20 sites to all be rendered public utilities. But that would require legislation regulating these private websites as newly minted public institutions and I'm sure the operators of these cash cows would have a word or two to say about the government seizing control of their businesses, even if indirectly through regulation.
Right now, legally, Google can do whatever they want on youtube with impunity - if we want that to change, that will require state involvement, because all these sites are way too big for a crowd of nerds on a forum to influence the business models of in profound ways.
In actuality I think society has reached a point where the ability to post something to facebook or youtube is actually a specific form of expression that should be protected as a public institution. That said, spreading dangerous misinformation is not wholly protected by free speech, if you are a weatherman and advise (with malintent) commuters fleeing an incoming storm to take a highway that is known to be dangerous then your speech is not protected, the government may silence your speech and you will likely face legal repercussions for doing so.
I think freedom of speech is very important and I do acknowledge that this issue is littered with slippery slopes but, not all speech is free and there are some forms of speech that should be controlled. The problem of how to do that as a society while not impeding free speech is extremely hard and unsolved, the best current solution might be to assume all speech is free until a court rules otherwise but that is not an ideal solution.
The correct course of action here is for our leaders to grow a spine and publicly acknowledge this is a problem.
Of course speech should be free until court rules otherwise. How otherwise you expect minority opinion to be safe from majority? It is not free speech if anybody with more power than you may shut you up.
Should he submit a request to have the case reviewed to the DA and ask a judge to allow him to stop you from taking that option?
The courts cannot be expected to individually guide every action (although law enforcement should be cognizant of the types of speech previously ruled to be free or restricted and respect that ruling with penalties for knowingly violating that precedent).
This stuff is complicated and making blanket statements is just silly. _Most_ speech should be protected, but some speech is limited.
Youtube is trying to stem the outflow of advertisers who've clearly stated that they don't want to be associated with certain kinds of content.
There's an argument that perhaps Youtube should provide the ability for content creators to provide their own Ad Network integration, if Youtube is unwilling to provide that monetisation themselves.
However, creators are free to source their own advertising deals and directly incorporate those into their videos - see just about everyone advertising Audible, Squarespace, Dollar Shave Club, Brilliant, etc.
But there have been many drugs with serious side effects pulled from the market some of them after regulators and drug companies behaving badly.
Is YouTube pulling them because of a sense of responsibility to open fair scientific inquiry? Or are they doing it as a PR stunt to distract from other bad behavior?
More than a few friends and people I know are immunocompromised, for them it is a big deal.
Leaving that aside, usually don't even understand why they choose to not vaccinate their child, they just believed someone that said it is bad. Look at the "flatearthers", some arguments are even funny because they are based in nothing. You can only just "believe" them.
Of course the government should do something about it. Don't forget the government is the society.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
They don't cause autism, but what if we set up mandatory vaccinations with absolutely no opt-out because some parents were offensively wrong, and later a vaccination does start causing serious problems and the government doesn't move fast enough to change its rules?
This is not necessarily a topic to be 'stamped out', and free speech has to transcend censorship, search engine companies hiding materials and discouraging the creation of those materials.
Isn't that because those issues usually aren't visible before around that time? (I am neither a GP nor a psycologist though so this is just trying to apply common sense.)
I demand my kids gets all recommended vaccines. Because even if there was a (vanishingly small) chance of a kid getting autism like symptoms I can live better with that risk than the much bigger risk that that being unvaccinated presents.
> This is not necessarily a topic to be 'stamped out', and free speech has to transcend censorship, search engine companies hiding materials and discouraging the creation of those materials.
Free speech is important. I would like to use mine to point out that looking at some anti-vaxxers (I'm not singling out your relatives, they might very well be reasonable people) one might get the idea that any autism in their kids might have simpler explanation than a vaccine that millions of other kids take without issue every year ;-)
Edit: that last paragraph really feels bad. My point is I mostly do defend peoples right to free speech (I might even pay close attention to people who argue against AGW as long as they are trying to be honest and have a discussion, not a sermon), but when it comes to vaccines it is actually pretty much settled science that they save millions of lives, millions of hours of suffering each year.
If anyone still wants to debate it, I might even listen carefully, but it really helps a lot if the other part treat the subject with the respect it deserves.
In some cases maybe, but it don't believe in all cases. A neighbour had this with her 7 month old baby, and symptoms showed up literary 4-5 hours after vaccination (not autistic symptoms of course, problems with breathing and similar), but at about 3-4 years you could already see some of the autistic symptoms in the kid along with speech impairment.
By not getting a vaccine when you medically can, you're putting others at risk because of your freedom.
The only thing YouTube has decided here is that they aren't going to take money from advertisers and give it to anti vaccine channels.
How do we stop this without making matters even worse? I want to say “educate people” yet that’s a pat response. Some people won’t be educated, it takes a lot of time, and how do we even agree on what a good education is? To me it’s critical thinking, STEM, and meeting other people. To others it’s teaching their kids that people like me are the agents of the devil, that fossils are a test from god or a plot by the CIA. How can that gap be bridged without someone trampling all over the rights of the other? How can people in such separate relaities not undermine each other or seek to use the system against each other, only to see it turned back on themselves?
How many times have you read a comment on a board and your first thought was, “That has to be a troll/shill/bot”? How often have you just given up on a discussion because the signal:noise ratio was intolerable? I know my answer is “too many times to count.” I worry that it means bad actors are winning, that I’ve fallen under the spell of Oh Dearism.
Crazy... to think YouTube execs had no clue that there is a direct correlation to the media they help propagate and the outbreak of previously cured diseases!
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/health/hepatitis-a-outbreak-s...
[2] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Typhus-Epidemic-Wor...
And it’s funny because a lot of them actually started with health related concerns.
Easier than that - you either vaccinate your kids or we take them away, period. We're ok taking kids away from parents who starve their kids or beat them or let their wounds get terribly infected. Why do we allow parents to keep children if they're not willing to vaccinate for bullshit reasons?
Aren't the people you care about vaccinated?
It is not that easy. Some people cannot be vaccinated, for example measles vaccination isn't licensed for babies younger than 6 months AFAIK. So they will still be at risk from others who could have gotten vaccinated but didn't.
This argument has convinced people exactly never.
It's amazing how much name calling is on this thread and how few links to research.
Want people to listen? Show them compassion.
Want people to vaccinate? Give them great information from trusted sources.
Want people to dismiss you? Call them names.
If we want to increase adoption, then please silence yourself on this subject as you're doing more harm than good.
It sounds like there's a lot of hurt and anger around this subject.
Hopefully cooler heads can prevail at some point as I think our health is more important than name calling or putting people we haven't met in big negative buckets.
I arrived at this conclusion after studying biochemistry for over a decade.
You think your "cursory" search is adequate to evaluate this problem? You think you can quickly Google complex problems and completely figure them out? That's weird. You seem to be the illogical superficial one.
I used to be a professional environmental engineer. There are real logical concerns with vaccines. Hardly any one will even listen to my logic, because most people are like you, who think it's logical to ignore logical arguments because you don't like it.
Pathetic. You're full of hate based on a "cursory" Google search.
That said, your comment is an excellent demonstrating of my point: it's technically incorrect, and focuses on shaming me for my opinion while lacking a substantive reply.
That idea is the same thing as believing that advertisers are obligated to show ads on your content, which is obviously wrong.
2. Google is a private company and has no obligation to support free speech on their platform.
But! Society is shifting to view recorded video as an expression of speech, and view facebook as a forum of ideas. These companies likely should be shifted to fall under carrier laws as they are a method for communication.
Far as I can see they still have the same ability to speak to the world as they ever did. All that changed is they won't profit from spouting lies.
It's not more difficult to upload a video, it's not more difficult to view it. Their ability to express their view has not changed in the slightest. If they cannot afford an internet connection of any form (that's vanishingly few these days), well they can get a soapbox, go down to the local park, and express their view in the traditional way.
First of all, I think phrasing matters here. "Making it more difficult to express yourself" makes it sound like someone is going out of their way to make it more difficult. What is actually happening is youtube deciding "not to go out of their way to make it easier".
When phrased like you said it, and you claim it is censorship, that makes it seem like youtube is obligated to pay you money for expressing your views. Do you not see how absurd that is?
Setting that aside, it's a lot easier for Sean Hannity to express his viewpoint than it is for me. My speech is much more limited than Sean Hannity's. Am I being censored? Is Fox obligated to give me a prime time TV show to express my opinion?
Herein lies the problem. The antivax movement is powered by the same propagandistic and diversionary tactics that powers all conspiracy. When brought to a wider audience for debate, antivax cultists use these spaces to appeal to members of the audience that can't tell the difference between pseudoscience and not.
Rather then engage in good faith with the ability to change heart, they use the debate stage to peel off supporters.
Yes -- and their ability to recruit and sustain their movement, like all movements, owes to a serious social problem that has a great deal of associated latent stress that they give an outlet to.
Namely, medical professionals have two serious problems:
1. They don't respect and communicate with their patients, as a matter of course. Just look at the standard discourse around medical treatment -- including the standard "15 minute blowoff" appointment.
2. (This is related, in that 1 likely caused 2, but --) They've utterly failed to explain modern medicine in a way understandable to their patients, forcing people to decide if they trust the same people who, eg, over-prescribed opiates based on shoddy science, leading to a national emergency. For a lot of people the answer is "no"; for some, it's "fuck no -- are you serious?"
The anti-vaxxer movement stems from these two facts of modern medicine, as much as whatever else you're trying to attribute.
The response that it's acceptable to use force against people for refusing to just shut up and trust you silently when you've routinely betrayed their trust without taking full, public accountability is psychotic.
At this point you're supporting pseudoscience and ranting about modern medicine in a very conspiratorial way.
That:
1. People don't trust doctors, partly due to how doctors act.
2. Doctors don't do a good job sharing medical knowledge.
I'm open to bets by anyone who wants to bet that either doctors are widely trusted by their patients or that they do a good job sharing medical knowledge, and am open to hearing ways to scientifically measure either.
But if you're not willing to bet against those two claims, then you probably agree with my conclusion -- that those two real problems are causing upset that's being (irrationally) channeled into things like anti-vaxxer movements.
Edit:
I can't find great quantified surveys, but this is a concern doctors have too --
https://www.physiciansweekly.com/doctors-losing-publics-trus...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2014/12/19/why-dont-a...
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/Trust_Be...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-rost/dont-trust-your...
http://mhealthwatch.com/more-than-half-of-all-americans-dont...
Where do you think the line should be drawn in your hypothetical government intervention?
If someone's religion said you needed to disobey red traffic lights, or shoot guns wildly into the air, we'd tell them to knock it off real quick.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/father-vanco...
Was that even a serious question?
How would you endanger others if you weren't? Well you could potentially contact the disease and then spread it to those others, right?
If you're asking how you would endanger someone in a society where 100% of all other people were vaccinated, well I guess you don't but that's not the world we live in.
I'm certainly not an antivaxxer. I receive vaccines and will vaccinate my children.
But the government mandating people vaccinate themselves or their children in order to participate in society crosses a line for me.
It may be reasonable in specific circumstances, which I haven't fully thought through, but not by broadly restricting access to public spaces.
The point is, women are free to abort unborn children. They're not free to let their (born) children die (of neglect). It's not an obvious choice whether they should be free to not vaccinate their children or not.
I mean, it really is. Not vaccinate can lead to death, not always but it massively increases the risk to the point that I consider it neglect. Just as a child left on the street may survive, it doesn't stop the path that put that child on the street being termed "neglect".
How can you be for bodily agency and also be in favor of forcing people to get vaccines?
No value is absolute. Trolley problem and all that (Judith Jarvis Thomson phrased the trolley problem as an organ transplant case it so happens). The potential destruction wrought by an unvaccinated child is deadly enough it overrides the individual bodily agency. By taking away the bodily agency of one child you are potentially saving several living, actual humans. When you take away the bodily agency of one woman, you are potentially saving the life of an unborn person at best. This doesn't compare favorably. Also, beyond bodily agency we need to weigh all effects of forcing a decision and forcing vaccinations have an extremely low chance of causing harm to the child being vaccinated whereas banning abortions have an extremely high chance of causing harm to the woman.
(Yes, I’m aware this is due to herd immunity. I’m not talking about hypothetical situations where the majority of people do not voluntarily get vaccinated)
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/laws/state-reqs.ht...
https://vaccines.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=003...
Obviously, restricting access to all public spaces goes much further...but functionally, this works well enough if we just get rid of the states with philosophical exemptions.
> It seems to be a minority of states that allow 'philosophical' exemptions.
Antivaxx is basically a religion, isn't it? ;)
Is it your right to potentially threaten their population by bringing in dangerous diseases? Or does this only apply to your current government?
As part of that, people that disregard vaccination are putting the lives of those around them in very real danger. Which is exactly why people believe anti-vaxxers are a problem, and why there's an increasing push to deny them the public sphere.
So do people that drive...
If thousands of people were dying of vaccine-preventable diseases I may reconsider my stance, but we are currently nowhere close to justifying crossing that line.
IMHO it's a self-correcting problem. If more people do start dying of these diseases some of the holdouts will get the vaccines.
Anti-vaxxers threaten the lives of innocent people and acting otherwise is incredibly callous and ignorant.
Like I said, if it's thousands I might reconsider my stance. If not, sorry, but it doesn't justify the government forcing people to do things to their body.
There's a huge logical problem with your argument. The reason why so few immune-compromised individuals die of vaccine-preventable diseases is because they're protected by herd immunity due to people being vaccinated.
When the vaccination rate goes down, you see more people die from vaccine preventable diseases. Because that's what vaccines do: they prevent people from dying from vaccine-preventable diseases. Which, often, is children.
To see this all we have to do is simply visualize history backwards, re-visiting the time before vaccines and medicine in general, and how people just horribly died in large numbers of diseases we don't even think of as deadly any more.
But what are the odds vaccine deniers would believe historic record, right?
The plague pandemics? Never happened; it's just a fabrication to promote vaccination.
I’ve repeatedly said I’d be willing to reconsider if that changes.
> forcing people to do things to their body.
Ah, but, firstly, your child's body isn't your body; that's a separate human being who has a right not to have idiot parents interfere with their survival.
Secondly, one person's immunization status affects others around them. It's not just a personal choice. Choosing not to be immunized and being around people is somewhat like smoking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine#Effectiveness
"Vaccines also help prevent the development of antibiotic resistance. For example, by greatly reducing the incidence of pneumonia caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, vaccine programs have greatly reduced the prevalence of infections resistant to penicillin or other first-line antibiotics."
Sourced from Nature Journal: https://web.archive.org/web/20170722121157/http://www.nature...
You're right, and I've never thought about the pneumonia vaccine being against bacteria as well, even though I've taken it myself.
The only reasonable default assumption is that even "idiot" parents have more interest in the survival and well-being of their own children than the vaccination industry equivalent of the Sackler family.
I was vaccine injured. I battled crippling physical pain and brain damage for over a decade. Do I not have a right to try and survive? Or are you willing to sacrifice people like me so you can be safe with minimal effort?
In medicine, we understand that there are risk calculations to every treatment and preventative decision. You weigh them against each other. When public health at large is the question, you certainly do have to consider the risks that come with public health policy.
For example, diabetics with retinopathy receive injections of medication that can help stop the condition from causing blindness. There is a 1/3000 chance that the injection can cause an infection which can lead to permanent blindness in the eye that was treated. You have to weigh the risks in this case personally when you're a diabetic with retinopathy, but imagine that the decision was instead that refusing the eye injection because of the tiny, well studied risk to yourself meant you were risking blinding someone else's child. It's not a perfect analogy but I hope it may help some understand that we aren't talking about a sacrifice in the way you seem to portray it in your questions.
Also, regarding your health issues, I am truly sorry. I also have some debilitating medical issues that have affected my daily life for almost 20 years, but when having discussions about policy or philosophy around medicine I try not to use them as an appeal to emotion because that can cloud your judgement and logic.
Yet it's widely known in the medical industry that all medical treatments carry risk, like you said.
I generally don't bother to argue logical points because no one will listen. But here are a couple of the big ones:
Measles is not a deadly disease for all but in the most rare of cases. Yet the claims of vaccine injuries are skyrocketing. It doesn't make sense to protect people from a non-deadly disease at the cost of giving millions lifelong debilitating illness.
There has not been one double-blind placebo controlled trial to evaluate the safety of any vaccine. All studies that have been done compare a newer vaccine to an older vaccine. Those are the kinds of studies people are referring to when they claim that there is no link between autism and vaccines. These studies only prove that the new vaccine is AS safe as the old vaccine.
The measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. Deaths from measles were already minuscule before the vaccine was even introduced.
Likewise, most diseases were well under control before the introduction of vaccines. This is due to advances in sanitation.
Of course, vaccines for polio are probably worth the risk/reward. But no one is actually talking about polio. We are talking about non-deadly diseases.
This is a decent summary with sources to these claims: http://www.jannyorganically.com/blog/2019/1/27/your-industry...
Not necessarily. Human-to-human transmission isn't the primary vector (if even possible) for a lot of diseases we get vaccinated for, e.g. yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, lyme disease, tetanus, shingles, rabies, etc.
We can both make lists of equal length back and forth, but we also both know that there are plenty of communicable diseases between humans. Would we be having this debate if the outbreaks weren’t measles, but Variola Major? ZEBOV?
There are laws on the books in the U.S.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"
The solution to bad speech is more speech, not less.
And yes, there are forms of speech not protected from abridgement by Congress.
I think you and I both know that talking about side effects of medical procedures is not even close to being one of them.
People should be restricted from accessing public spaces if they pose a direct and credible threat to the public. If a person is not vaccinated, they are a threat to the health of those around them. It is not an issue of speech.
Yes it has. If I understand you correctly, you suggest that the treatment having a 0.01% chance of being live-saving also be considered in the same way.
Currently, that is true. But medical opinion changes constantly. Is that really the proper domain of government?
What might also help is research about what % of kids don't respond to vaccines so people who choose not to vaxx can better understand their impact.
Edit: In case you were interested in hard data on non-responder rates here is that data: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr6007a1.htm
I hope we can learn from these intense political discussions that wether it's vaccinations, guns, MeToo, abortion, etc., if you skip the calm discussion of the facts and skip right to name calling, public shaming and advocating criminal prosecution, you've only succeeded in appealing to those who already agree with you.
So, what do we really want? To shame the other side or find compassion and common ground?
Unfortunately, if you look at all the anger getting upvoted, it's a very emotional discussion that probably will just alienate anyone who's on the fence or just starting to research things.
And YouTube's decision was to silence anti-vaxxers, not mandate vaccines.
On the other hand, antivaxxing is one of those problems crying out to stamped into the dust. I don’t particularly care if some decides to eat lots of fruit instead of getting chemotherapy, because their cancer isn’t contagious. Immunization though, is a matter of public health, and my patience for precious fools on a mission is precisely 0 when it could hurt people I care about.
Still... why the hell is this something we let YouTube decide? The problem with antivaxxers isn’t their YouTube channels, it’s the fact that our lawmakers are too cowardly to pass some laws around the issue. YouTube shouldn’t be in a position to exert this kind of power, and this isn’t how issues should be tackled. This doesn’t solve anything, it just obscures it. A solution involves restricting access to public spaces for selfish morons who don’t get vaccinated, and yes, their children.
Edit: Sorry I just realized that my comment is on the border of being little more than a rant. Like a lot of people here I suspect that this is the intersection of two issues I care about deeply; a big tech company’s questionable, situational ethics and enormous power, and the horror of people facing debilitation or death because of pseudoscience. I’m angry, I’m frustrated, and while I know having the government intervene is fraught with danger, it seems necessary especially in cases of public health.