> But it is also hard to watch principles being ignored for immediate benefit.
This won't even provide any "benefit" in terms of increased vaccination rates, but that's not the real purpose anyway. What they're really doing is carving up large chunks of people into information silos and trying to reduce the amount of communication happening between them.
If one were charitable to this action, you'd say they're blowing up a silo full of rat poison and disallowing people from adding poison back in.
The balance between "free speech" in the moral, not legal, sense and disinformation is going to be just like "security v. privacy" has been, but perhaps even harder to draw lines for.
If you accept as a premise that most anti-vax sentiment is driven by charlatan media outlets and influencers (and probably nation-state adversaries), and that much of what is repeated by laypeople is an echo of this intentional drivel, and that this drivel is immediately costing not only their own lives, but the lives of others, what do you do? It's literally a disease.
Which the Chinese would say about "people talking about democracy". So there it is: Where, if at all, do we in a "free society" draw the line where harmful disinformation campaigns get cut out?
I argued several years back that the "app layer" of the internet should have more freedom of control over their content, but that the "infrastructure" layer should be expected to be more neutral. In other words, if an anti-vax website or social network got hosted on AWS, it would be a different thing for AWS or a registrar to kick them out.
Well I reject your premise, but on a more fundamental level I simply do not believe (on the basis of overwhelming evidence) that the gargantuan tech monopolies and the people pulling their strings care at all about the public health, disease prevention, or human life, so I am left looking for other motives.
During the debate over Covid vaccines a common refrain has been "any safety issues have always shown up within a few months of administration." This is straight up misinformation: the Pandemix vaccine is a very high profile counterexample where symptoms first appeared about a year after the first shots were given, and it took another year after that for authorities to acknowledge the link. I only know about this because I occasionally peruse sources which would probably be labeled as "anti-vax," whereas the people repeating the false claim ad nauseam have often picked it up from sources which would be considered "authoritative," including public health authorities. But especially on this issue we have to pretend that there is one "side" which has a monopoly on accurate information.
I wonder how much longer YouTube will even allow you to point out that the manufacturers of the completely-safe-beyond-any-doubt-whatsoever Covid vaccines have been blanket exempted from liability for any injuries caused by their products.
This won't even provide any "benefit" in terms of increased vaccination rates, but that's not the real purpose anyway. What they're really doing is carving up large chunks of people into information silos and trying to reduce the amount of communication happening between them.