The BBC has boasted that it triggered the removal of a Facebook vaccine injury support group with over 250,000 members.
The BBC has seen several groups, one with hundreds of thousands of members, in which the [carrot] emoji appears in place of the word ‘vaccine’. Facebook’s algorithms tend to focus on words rather than images. The groups are being used to share unverified claims of people being either injured or killed by vaccines.
Once the BBC alerted Facebook’s parent company, Meta, the groups were removed.
“We have removed this group for violating our harmful misinformation policies and will review any other similar content in line with this policy. We continue to work closely with public health experts and the U.K. Government to further tackle Covid vaccine misinformation,” the firm said in a statement.
However, the groups have since reappeared in our searches.
One group we saw has been around for three years but rebranded itself to focus on vaccine stories, from being a group for sharing “banter, bets and funny videos” in August 2022.
The rules of the very large group state: “Use code words for everything.” It adds: “Do not use the c word, v word or b word ever” (Covid, vaccine, booster). It was created more than a year ago and has more than 250,000 members.
Marc Owen-Jones, a disinformation researcher, and associate professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, was invited to join it.
“It was people giving accounts of relatives who had died shortly after having the COVID-19 vaccine”, he said. “But instead of using the words ‘COVID-19’ or ‘vaccine’, they were using emojis of carrots.
“Initially I was a little confused. And then it clicked – that it was being used as a way of evading, or apparently evading, Facebook’s fake news detection algorithms.”
I wonder if Parliament’s champion of the vaccine injured Sir Christopher Chope has anything to say about this? He is just about to launch a new All Party Parliamentary Group on COVID-19 Vaccine Damage.
The BBC helpfully explains that the ONS stated the risk of fatal vaccine injury last year – thus implying these people must all be wrong, or at least ought not to be allowed to talk to one another.
In 2021 data from the Office for National Statistics suggested that there was a one in 5 million risk of dying from the Covid vaccine, compared with a risk of 35,000 deaths per five million of dying from Covid itself, if unvaccinated.
Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, these figures are correct, they are not broken down by age and only cover deaths not injuries. A recent study by Dr. Peter Doshi and colleagues found that in the vaccine trials the vaccines were more likely to cause serious injury than prevent it. A recent paper from Oxford, Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities similarly found that in young adults aged 18-30 the vaccines were 18-98 times more likely to cause serious injury than prevent it. The BBC and Facebook, on the other hand, don’t believe that these injuries exist, or at least that the injured should be allowed to speak to one another and seek mutual support.
Is that why these people pay their licence fee – so the BBC can go round banning their support groups?
Facebook says it removes content which claims vaccines are more dangerous than the disease they protect against. But what if that’s what the evidence shows? Will it remove peer-reviewed scientific studies that go against its policy?
“And yet it moves…”
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We were having a discussion the other day here about whether Israel or that situation or China or the demographics of the planet especially Africa posed the greater threat to our civilisation. But really, it matters little while supposedly premier institutions like Cambridge stick the knife into us from within.
I will second that tof.
People who produce that kind of stuff make me want to spit because they have great privilege and are abusing it, at our expense. Despicable. The country we have made them rich and “respected” but that respect is not reciprocated. Sinister, patronizing snobs.
Quite so. And it is much, much more than mere censorship, now. It is the active denigration of anything ethnically European, which, very much in the spirit of anti-Semitism, blames “whites” for all human ills. Worse still, it presents as “colonisation” the habitation and natural dominance within Europe of Europeans, rather suggesting the flat lie: that others were once the majority at some unspecified date; or that we are some kind of inhuman bacillus which has no right to live anywhere, let alone make claims to being an indigenous people.
Woke is nothing but Red N@zism; and whites are its scapegoats. From unreasoning, illogical, perverted ideologies like those currently promoted at Cambridge spring genocide and nothing less. This will be dismissed as exaggerated – but were any of Powell’s predictions mistaken? Did he not calculate the numbers? Did he not point out the cultural effects of mass immigration? Did he not make it crystal clear that these cultural difficulties would be used by the left to advance sectarian claims? Well, then: the next dark steps down the stairwell should be looked at unflinchingly. And they are leading to Hell.
Wokery is like one of those flesh eating disorders, where the organism eats itself. The shark and the hyena are less of a threat then itself.
Here we go again – who defines “problematic?”
A problematic read for me could be any number of things but to give just one example and I have made this point previously on DS, articles that are heavy on graphs, charts and statistics are hard work, for me. Basically I lack the patience. Numbers tend to bore me and graphs remind me of maps. I am useless at map reading.
It is not that I cannot fathom these articles, I simply cannot be bothered. Of course suggesting that such articles should be banned because they “bother” me is nonsense.
Shakespeare will be “problematic” for many dealing as he does with the whole gamut of the human condition. Wilfred Owen – too much raw blood and guts. The Metaphysical Poets – far too philosophical, romantic, whimsical, indulgent for modern sensibilities.
Of course I could go on.
Anybody whose words are committed to print will at some point be at risk of upsetting someone, somewhere and it will always be thus. So where does “problematic” start and end?
I doubt a day goes by, particularly nowadays when I don’t come across an article that I find “problematic” in some way or other. Currently the Israel / Gaza situation often presents “difficult” articles but the bottom line is that I make the choice to read or not. And if I stumble into an article I find unpleasant I can always close the page.
Overt censorship cannot and will not work. Any such imposition will result in a flourishing samizdst industry regardless of any threats or sanctions.
The very talk of flagging “problematic” literature is horrifically Stalinist in its intent and proves beyond doubt that those working in our educational / cultural institutions to impose such measures should have their employment terminated immediately and with extreme prejudice.
Yes, articles such as this are “problematic” – they make my pho# kin’ blood boil.
I think you’ll find problematic defined in a dictionary. Presumably Cambridge library will have a good selection of dictionaries to choose from.
P.S. I have problems with dictionaries re-defining technical terms and setting them as their primary definition. e.g. exponential.
Yep ———-“Problematic”. “Hate Crime” “Climate Denier” etc etc. ———-All with the intention of outlawing anything out with particular narratives that seek to impose will on others. ———Tyranny.
What is ‘problematic’ for these ‘censors’, is it is the older, white, middle class demographic that visit the museums, galleries, talks, theatres, historic houses etc and the ones who are most likely to react to the woke nonsense.
Once your target market disappears so will their jobs and some of them are too dim to see it.
Let me get my old Volume of Mark Twain books out. Oh which one will I choose to read with the recliner up and hot cup of cocoa?———- Maybe “Life on the Mississippi” or “Huckleberry Fin”, or “Puddenhead Wilson”.——————But wait maybe I will see the N word. Oh dear isn’t life so hard these days?
Alas Furedi’s article shows that my own alma mater, Pembroke, is at the forefront of the response to the U.L.s rallying call. My own full response, as a member both of Pembroke and the U.L., here.