YouTube recently announced it will ban content that spreads misinformation regarding not just the coronavirus vaccines but vaccination science in general. It’s an acknowledgment that today’s misplaced conservative resistance to the coronavirus vaccines both feeds and is fed by the broader anti-vaccination movement that was around well before the pandemic.
YouTube and other social media giants must stand up to the inevitable but incorrect cries of censorship from the right and stick with this policy. Individual Americans have a constitutional right to lie — that’s the price of free speech — but private companies aren’t obligated to amplify or provide a platform for those lies.
Anti-vaccination misinformation has been around for years, promoted mainly by people who either don’t understand or don’t trust medical science, and who have short historical memories of just how savagely various forms of illness attacked communities prior to the availability of vaccines. False claims that some vaccines cause autism in children have exposed kids to real risk because their parents have embraced that misinformation. A year before the current pandemic, Washington state was wracked by a series of measles outbreaks caused by people who refused to have their kids vaccinated.
