Social media attacks anti-vaxxers



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While the risk to public health of those who avoid science and believe that celebrities about the "risk" of vaccination is increasing, more and more people are looking for ways to cope with epidemics and fight misinformation.

Recently, I wrote an article that proposed to quarantine anti-vaxxers in modern leprosy colonies.

As I indicated in this article, we have already exceeded our worst annual outbreak since the declaration of measles eradication, and we only did so in the first third of this year .

The problem is not better. New York was faced with a measles crisis that many tried to say was limited to the orthodox Jewish community, a notion that The New York Times recently reported is not accurate:

While the measles epidemic worsens in New York, health authorities are focusing on schools affiliated with ultra-Orthodox Judaism, which are the only schools in the city where measles transmission has occurred so far. . But immunization data, reported annually by all schools to the state, suggest that reluctance to vaccinate in New York is much more prevalent.

At present, some social media platforms are taking a brief break, after adopting the regime of the total Soviet Union vis-à-vis Republicans and conservatives, to tackle the problem of l & # 39; 39, anti-vaxxer.

Facebook announced in March that it would start advertising anti-vaccination ads.

Friday, Instagram, subsidiary of Facebook, participated in the repression:

More than The hill:

Instagram this week has blocked the hashtag #VaccinesKill amid its suppression of misinformation about vaccines, and says it is studying other hashtags typically used to promote false information about vaccines.

The social media network owned by Facebook had previously refused to block the hashtag #VaccinesKill, a popular gathering place for anti-vaccine activists on Instagram, arguing that the phrase "kill vaccines" did not count as medical misinformation. An Instagram spokesperson in an email to The Hill last month claimed that there had been rare instances in which side effects of the vaccine had caused death.

But under pressure this week as a result of a CNN Business report on medical misinformation amplified under #VaccinesKill, Instagram has blocked the hashtag and said it was extending its crackdown on medical misinformation to include hashtags that are often used to promote anti-vaccine feelings denial.

It's a mixed bag because anti-vaxxers will no doubt scream that their right to freedom of expression is denied. Apart from the fact that most people do not understand what "freedom of speech" really means, there is still a wider debate about the choice of social media and the choice of individuals and groups who can access social media. free platforms always very useful for the dissemination of information and the dissemination of information. information.

We all have a list of people we would rather not hear, but that does not mean we should encourage efforts to silence them. A better use of the platforms would be an aggressive and very public campaign to educate the public on the true science that proves that the crowd of anti-vaccines is wrong.

We will not change the ideas of most anti-vaxxers – they are rather cult. However, there are people likely to be vulnerable to this anti-science hysteria who can always be saved by being exposed to the right information.

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