Their policies are clearly not defined by morality, as shown by the fact that they only took down the Tatmadaw's site yesterday, 3 weeks after they violently took control. The only answer I can see is to not use them, and they will die. I think the answer has to be distributed networks where no one has the power to take them down, but it will mean that no one can take down miss information.
That's the likely end conclusion, the consumers of information have to decide what is or isn't. It's annoying when a company does it of its own volition...but it's outright dangerous when the government itself starts doing so.
I did not know of this event, so I had to inform myself before commenting. This protest seems to have been responsible for denying other people access to be vaccinated and aims to disrupt vaccination. I feel this goes beyond trying to have an open informed discussion.
Insofar as obstruction of people is a crime. But taking down discussion of committing an explicit/specific crime is different from the widescale censorship the government/big tech are collaborating.
Note that the protest itself is a legal grey area. It is not okay to claim that protests obstructing people is or isn't justified by subjective preferences. I would broadly say that there *should* be legal standards limiting the ability of protests to obstruct/constrain movement of others. I also would expect that rule to be enforced the same way each time, regardless of the nature/motivation of protest.
I believe the biggest scare factor of vaccins is people not knowing how they work. And if you can reach only 1% of those, that's 1% who gets informed instead of being driven of to more shadier internet back alleys.
Vaccines broadly carry some risk, but that risk is so tiny compared to the balance of risk when not taking them that choosing the large risk over the miniscule one is nonsense.
However, COVID does have a few red flags:
- This vaccine was put to market much faster than usual.
- This vaccine is relatively novel in its design/function/type of virus.
- Manufacturers have been granted legal protection for complications (excepting "willful misconduct") as an emergency measure, which is not typical for vaccines as a whole since they are not done in context of emergency.
- CDC treatment of deaths near time of vaccination is different from CDC treatment of deaths of patients who test positive for COVID. Scrutiny for one is much higher than the other.
With all that in mind, even the most aggressive/unrealistic estimation of deaths from receiving the vaccine is still tiny, relative to death rate from COVID itself. Especially for those who are considered at-risk for COVID. What we don't know are other side effects/long-term complications that are not lethal but still might influence whether an otherwise healthy person would choose to risk COVID vs the vaccine...since for them the risk from COVID is also relatively small (in contrast to things like Ebola which have a much larger chance to kill anybody who gets them). Aggressively shutting down "misinformation" which may or may not actually be misinformation when you have one centralized source deciding what constitutes "misinformation" is dangerous territory.
Running afoul of this stuff is not okay:
Informed Consent | Encyclopedia.com
Considering we've been dealing with COVID for over a year, "emergency" provisions are not acceptable in the US, and have also been flagrantly violated in places like Canada already wrt curfew for example. If something is considered to be misinformation, that can be said without snap-removing potentially accurate/relevant information on the grounds that it's "misinformation". It might or might not be, but we don't need a ministry of truth determining that for us.
