03-19-2019, 10:14 AM
I was reading an article this morning about Anti Vaxer communities on the internet who will troll parents of children who die of vaccine preventable diseases in order to silence them. I got to thinking, how do people become so horrible? The talk right now is "Right Wing Extremists" and before that it was "Muslim Extremists", but what fuels this stuff? As great as the internet is, it appears that it has allowed crazy people to unite without geographical boundaries that had previously acted as a buffer between crazy and the rest of the world.
In today's world to believe vaccines are harmful is to believe in fairy tales, yet here we are today. We allow dangerous rhetoric to be repeated on the internet and to be used to unit the naive in a crusade of hate. This really isn't much different than things we are seeing in different arenas such as politics and religion. I continue to struggle with the idea of free speech versus hate speech and where proven false speech lands inside of that spectrum. Does speech that is false with intent to insight hate fall under hate speech even if the words themselves weren't hateful in a vacuum? We built the idea around free speech with the belief that people could choose what and who to listen to. They could decide what they agreed with and what they didn't agree with, but what happens when your populations inability to properly reason these things out becomes dangerous?
This phenomenon isn't going to end, this idea of latching on to a belief and shutting out all ability to reason around it. "Flat earth" came about a few years back in pop culture (I know it existed in fringe before) as a joke, yet has gained enough traction that people actually believe it. Anti Vaxers refuting all science to push a narrative that we have seen contribute to the reemergence of diseases that were stomped out in our country over a decade ago. Political parties using false or misleading media and internet campaigns to not only drive voting but illicit actual emotional responses to the falsehoods.
This thread has no real purpose, call it a rant of sorts. I got here from the Anti-Vaxers but they are just another example of the internet radicalization of fringe ideas. We have gotten to a place where we have this tool with immense power yet it goes relatively unchecked. This tool is accessible to almost anyone and allows cancerous beliefs to slowly spread and multiply. There is no way to eradicate these groups from the tool so they continue to grow and their beliefs, and hate, continue to fester. Those beliefs eventually manifest in verbal assaults, physical assault, and actual killings....and there is nothing we can do to stop it because Pandora's Box is open.
In today's world to believe vaccines are harmful is to believe in fairy tales, yet here we are today. We allow dangerous rhetoric to be repeated on the internet and to be used to unit the naive in a crusade of hate. This really isn't much different than things we are seeing in different arenas such as politics and religion. I continue to struggle with the idea of free speech versus hate speech and where proven false speech lands inside of that spectrum. Does speech that is false with intent to insight hate fall under hate speech even if the words themselves weren't hateful in a vacuum? We built the idea around free speech with the belief that people could choose what and who to listen to. They could decide what they agreed with and what they didn't agree with, but what happens when your populations inability to properly reason these things out becomes dangerous?
This phenomenon isn't going to end, this idea of latching on to a belief and shutting out all ability to reason around it. "Flat earth" came about a few years back in pop culture (I know it existed in fringe before) as a joke, yet has gained enough traction that people actually believe it. Anti Vaxers refuting all science to push a narrative that we have seen contribute to the reemergence of diseases that were stomped out in our country over a decade ago. Political parties using false or misleading media and internet campaigns to not only drive voting but illicit actual emotional responses to the falsehoods.
This thread has no real purpose, call it a rant of sorts. I got here from the Anti-Vaxers but they are just another example of the internet radicalization of fringe ideas. We have gotten to a place where we have this tool with immense power yet it goes relatively unchecked. This tool is accessible to almost anyone and allows cancerous beliefs to slowly spread and multiply. There is no way to eradicate these groups from the tool so they continue to grow and their beliefs, and hate, continue to fester. Those beliefs eventually manifest in verbal assaults, physical assault, and actual killings....and there is nothing we can do to stop it because Pandora's Box is open.
