YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

It sounds like both you and your mother have both adopted an epistemology that incorporates the perceived amount of censorship, lies, and coercion performed by proponents of some claim into your discernment of the truth value of that claim. Namely, you both seem to have adopted some level of doubt about pro-vaccine claims because you both perceive that proponents of pro-vaccine claims participate in censorship, lies and coercion, or that those proponents of these claims do not engage in reasonable arguments with their critics.

There are two problems with this type of epistemology. The first is that, like all claims, attributes of the people making the claims are not relevant to the truth value of the claim ("fallacy of irrelevance"). The second is more important and more unique to this particular epistemology: the actions you perceive to be conducted by perceived proponents of some claim will vary heavily based on your own behavior. For instance, how do you know that pro-vaccine people "can't win arguments" and instead "stop them because the other side is too stupid"? Or that there is "massive censorship" favoring the pro-vaccine viewpoint? Surely that is just based on your own "media diet." Surely that perception depends heavily on where you spend your time on Twitter, YouTube, cable news, etc. Would you perceive something differently if it were the case that the vast majority of medical and public health experts who are pro-vaccine in fact have engaged in numerous reasonable arguments with critics and have nonetheless come to the same conclusion? Is there ever a point in which litigation of existing criticisms can end so that we can move on to new criticisms?

> Oh, but it's also not FDA approved. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I bet vaccinations haven't gone up significantly since FDA approval. Obviously it's because the FDA isn't to be trusted, that's a given.

Actually, there was a big shift in the numbers about then. People are just divided over whether it was due to shaming people or the certification. I believe Matthew Yglasias posted about that, though he seemed to think it was from shaming people.

It's true that some people moved on to other arguments after that, but if someone has multiple independent reasons for not wanting something, you do kinda have to shoot them all down.

From my experience in trying to explain the benefits of the vaccine to the hesitant, there are more than a few who just won't listen, but there are quite a lot of people who will listen when you calmly explain things. Trying to be forceful will basically always backfire.

Many of them were previously meming about how Covid is not very dangerous, with only a 1-2% mortality rate. So I like to point out that the risk of vaccine injury is several orders of magnitude lower. You need thousands of people dying per day for months to convince anyone that the vaccine is anywhere near as dangerous as the virus, not the odd death of someone the day after they vaccinated here and there.

Once you get people into a direct comparison even if they push back on the numbers being fudged, you can point that every country in the world would have to be in on some conspiracy.

I feel like this is the most effective way to defuse the vastly over-hyped danger of the vaccine. Even if they try to quibble the numbers with the best and worst numbers possible, you don't get to risks that are even the same order of magnitude.

Saying that it's all not in good faith quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, I find that most people are willing to have an honest discussion with someone who respects them and who will listen and address their concerns.

Those conditions are hard, though, because a lot of people seem to quickly throw human empathy out the window and start yelling. That... doesn't work at all.

Anyhow, that's my experience from talking to people. I've gotten several of the hesitant to vaccinate by trying to be as honest as possible about the risks and why worrying about the vaccine but not Covid doesn't make sense. But if you don't listen to or understand where the people arguing are coming from--which is often hard with internet strangers--you probably won't get very far, so I do understand why it's frustrating.

I am absolutely OK with any platform censoring any content for any reason, as long as they are not treated like a public square by the government.

I would say that currently today that there is a much bigger threat to public health of people believing in insane vaccine conspiracies than there is of people following homeopathy. If you kill yourself snorting ginger root it doesn't really affect other people like it does when you spread covid to 200 people in your church, since rough math would say two of them will die directly from your insane actions.

If we had an epidemic of homeopathy where millions of people are doing that instead of surgery and ending up dead instead of healed, we'd probably see similar enforcement.

You can't put out every tiny little fire, there are too many as you say, but stopping the big blazes that are currently taking over can certainly be done to an extent within your own platform with moves like this.

You pretty obviously can argue with people who don't argue in good faith. When they shift the goal posts call attention to it, explain it, and then meet them where they are at. People watching will see the other party being duplicitous.

I'm imagining YouTube or the government or whoever hiring some informed experts and inviting the vaccine hesitant on for debates. Let them make whatever arguments they want and when they are absurd or move the goalposts point it out. Are medical doctors X, Y, and Z, selected for being informed and skilled orators going to be outdebated by the likes of Alex Jones? Why can't we have some experts who just engage with the conspiracy theory stuff, not sneeringly but just dispassionately.

I don't think this would convince everyone. I don't think convincing everyone should be the goal. I do think it would convince more people than the current approach though and it would be more in keeping with free speech ideals.