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Re:Breakthrough in Synthetic Vaccine Technology Requires No ... by Mountain_Skies on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @12:21PM (#21127222)
Deplatforming will only work in the short term. Eventually you deplatfom large enough populations that they either create their own platforms or someone sees a business opportunity in providing one for them. Except now on the platforms designed to cater just to them, your voice will be censored just as you gleefully censored their voice. Unless you want to go full authoritarian the trend of deplatforming anything you disapprove of will eventually lead to worse outcomes.
Re:Breakthrough in Synthetic Vaccine Technology Requires No ... by yyyk on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:08PM (#21128685)
I do not even dream of 'deplatforming anything [I] disapprove of'. But your reply made me think again why I consider going to all these lengths with regards to anti-vax.

Well, it seems like child abuse to me, and it's not even containable - the effects are not limited to their family, but can effect mine as well* . Second, I don't see a way for political resolution here. On political matters there are votes and if my side loses, that's the way it is. Here, the very fact such a movement exists (even if the vast majority is against it and votes against it) puts some immunocompromised people at risk.

* There are religious sects that agree to basically live apart of society - so it wouldn't matter that much to us what they do - but I don't think that's a possible resolution to this issue, not for most anti-vaxxers.

Re:Breakthrough in Synthetic Vaccine Technology Requires No ... by BurningFrog on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:35PM (#21129007)
> Second, I don't see a way for political resolution here

Typically, the resolution is some form of mandating that kids get vaccinated.

Re:Breakthrough in Synthetic Vaccine Technology Requires No ... by yyyk on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:54PM (#21129201)
That could happen too, at least in some states (in others it may be illegal).

However, given that these parents believe that puts their child and themselves at risk, they'd go far to stop it, up to faking vaccinations - at which point any outbreak would "prove" the vaccines are ineffective. So I don't think there's a way of avoiding a confrontation with the movement itself.

Re:Breakthrough in Synthetic Vaccine Technology Requires No ... by PhasmaFelis on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @02:33PM (#21128976)
That's only true if they continue growing reliably after being deplatformed. There's no reason why that should necessarily be true.

I feel like there a tendency to believe that, since censorship is bad, censorship must also be completely ineffective, and we tell stories like "deplatforming is useless" to reinforce that. But I don't think that's a realistic approach. Censorship can and does work, in the right circumstances. Chinese millennials may know that something happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989, but they're fuzzy on the details and inclined to downplay it and keep quiet about it. That's censorship working as intended. Assuming your enemies are incompetent doesn't accomplish anything but a false sense of security.