Following on from the Royal Society wanting to criminalise speech, Labour are at it.
Emergency laws to “stamp out dangerous” anti-vaccine content online should be introduced, Labour has said.
The party is calling for financial and criminal penalties for social media firms that do not remove false scare stories about vaccines.
It follows news of progress on the first effective coronavirus vaccine.
The government said it took the issue “extremely seriously” with “a major commitment” from Facebook, Twitter and Google to tackle anti-vaccine content.
So, no lessons learned from history then?
You do not tackle bad ideas by shutting them down with the law. You tackle them by discussing them out in the open, with facts, evidence, reason and logic.
When one side of the discussion silences the other for being wrong, there is no debate. And, without debate, how can we decide what is wrong? And let’s be clear here, this isn’t about the anti-vaxxers, who are a fringe minority. This is about silencing those of us who are concerned – legitimately – about this vaccine. It is also setting a precedent to silence anyone who dares to dissent on the other sacred cows – see, also climate hysteria.
The so called fact checkers are all too often nothing of the sort and I’ve seen articles and videos that have been “fact checked” as misleading, that when watched turn out to be valid arguments by people who understand their subject matter – see doctors who dare to contradict the narrative on Covid. See also, for example, anything to do with dodgy doings during the US election – nothing to see here, move along, never mind the sworn affidavits, never mind the dead people who voted, never mind the computer glitches, never mind the supreme court of Pennsylvania making up law in contravention of the US constitution, that’s not fact, it’s misleading information.
So, the Soviet Union is being used as a template here and that discomfort you are feeling is a jackboot on your face.
The anti-vaxxers would be harmless, if their deliberate lies only affected themselves …
But – “Your freedom to swing your arms about, ends at my nose”
Their actions are – quite literally – killing innocent victims, gullible adults, their own & other people’s children.
Therefore, they need stopping.
Are you being deliberately stupid here? Have you learned nothing from history? Criminalising speech doesn’t stop it, it makes it go underground where it will spread without challenge. Not only is such action totalitarian in nature, it is utterly cretinous because it makes the problem worse, not better.
I think we are talking across each other …
How do you view the way the state protects children of Jehovah’s Loonies, when they need a Blood Transfusion?
The ant-vaxxers are no different, except they are inflicting their dangerous & crimianl deliberate lies on everybody, not just theor own families.
I can see your point about freedom of speech, bur, but ….
Mein Kampf & the Communist Manifesto are more deliberate & dangerous lies, along with the Bible & the Koran, of course … I never said it was easy!
@Greg
If there is nothing to worry about, why have UK Gov’t granted legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers, supply chain and whoever injects it?
If I don’t take it, how does that harm others who, being obedient, have taken it?
Catch C-19 and recover – 99.99% immune; take vaccine and maybe 90% immune to symptoms – 1 in 10 chance not
Why? He’s already had it – or was that faked?
You have a point
In NZ, there is automatic compensation for the very tiny minority who react badly to medications – that is the correct way to go.
Greg T, google “Vaccine Damage Payment”. No liability for the vaccine producers and all the liability to the tax payer. £120,000. Good scam eh?
And today, you want THEM stopped but tomorrow someone else may want YOU stopped. You happy with that?
And therein lies the point. A point the bansturbators always miss, because they will always be the ones in control.
They THINK they will be always be the ones in control
Both climate and vaccines are scientific matters and, as such, need to be discussed openly in order to ascertain the truth. Genuine truth seekers are always in favour of free and open discussion, only those who know that they are in the wrong or have something to hide think otherwise. Politicised science is highly dangerous, anyone ever heard of Lysenko?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism#:~:text=Lysenkoism%20(Russian%3A%20%D0%9B%D1%8B%D1%81%D0%B5%CC%81%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%89%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0%2C%20tr,benefits%20of%20vernalization%20and%20grafting.
Can we just stop for a moment and remember what was, arguably, the key precipient event in the growth of the anti-vax movement in the U.K. – the whole episode of Andrew Wakefield and the MMR scare? Critical mass in the British anti-vax movement did not stem from conspiracy theorists sounding forth in the pub, nor was it spread by social media. Wakefield was a professional medical researcher and his paper was peer-reviewed and published in The Lancet (where it remained online until around 2010, long after it had been thoroughly discredited). To this day The Lancet has never apologised nor taken its share of the responsibility for the episode which more than anything else seriously undermined people’s trust in the vaccination process. So I will brook no legislation nor lectures from the likes of Greg T nor further clampdowns on our civil liberties.
Quite. The man was a charlatan, a charlatan who was part of the establishment.
But – when hos results were re-tested & found to be fraudulent – he was, quite rightly disowned.
You need to remember both parts of the story
@LR
Re: “I’ve Not Heard Of” – The Fall of Owen Jones (until BBC/C4 Hire him)
The Guardian Cancels Owen Jones
Will we hear Right too?
I need to hire a team: film crew, producers, editors… and I want your money, I’m not paying
Utter twat detached from reality – start alone as other ‘tubers/vlogs do. Adverts? Google has his back and he can say anything without risk of demonetising or shutdown
Interestingly Jones has made a small fortune from his books and journalism, writing guff that the pseudo (but wealthy) middle and upper class lefties suck up like hoovers over the years… not that he ever mentions that at all.
And as such he bears more than a comparison with Donald Trump, who feeds right wing and fascist troll bait to America whilst monetarising the resulting anger for his own benefit with the other hand…
John, Trump has not taken any of the salary to which he is entitled during his presidency.
He has also lost approx.$2b of his personal wealth during his term in office.
The fact that people think things doesn’t make them true and the fact that people then say them as if they were true says everything about them.
Yeah it’s more than amusing how the boy Jones happily feeds from the table of the corporate mainstream media empire that is The Guardian, and then attacks them for being corporate whores as soon as they sack him – from the global corporate media platform that is YouTube…
But then Jones never really suffered from any sense of how the rest of the world sees him, with his endless boring Wolfy Smith class anger and his inability to write a single article without managing to blame Margret Thatcher for most of it.