Facebook has announced that it will begin a slow purge of anyone questioning the absolute safety of vaccines, following the likes of Pinterest and YouTube. Of course, censorship backfires in many ways, and the push to censor vaccine skeptics will have the effect of dramatically growing their movement via the Streisand Effect, so called due to Barbara Streisand’s $50 million lawsuit against a photographer, for the crime of taking a picture of her house. She called it an invasion of privacy, but the ensuing publicity of the lawsuit resulted in a huge interest in the picture that was not there before.
Vaccine skeptics are intelligent, motivated, and organized. They will not just give up if they’re booted from the largest social media platforms. They will develop their own platforms, and, thanks to the attempted censorship, their audience will grow far more than it would have otherwise.
