Addressing Pro-Murder Content Here

[noaccount]

I appreciate everything the mods are doing to maintain a pro-choice space here. I am worried that some people are able to come here, however, and post encouragement to incite actions that can hurt and kill other people. INCLUDING posting medical misinformation, that stops people from being able to make informed-consent choices about health risks. And including encouraging people to go unmasked and unvaxxed in public, including in settings where elderly and sick people and low-wage workers have already been killed by the thousands via exposure.

(THIS WAS IN A THREAD WHERE SOMEONE HAD ALREADY TALKED ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE IN THEIR LIFE DYING OF THE VIRUS, AND A SECOND PERSON HAD MENTIONED A MALICIOUS NEGLIGENT HEALTH-CARE WORKER BARGING UNMASKED INTO THEIR SICK DISABLED SISTER'S SPACE. THESE ARE NOT HYPOTHETICALS, THEY ARE LIFE AND DEATH ISSUES FOR PEOPLE HERE NOW.)

It would also be a powerful leverage-point against us, if pro-lifers who want to shut this site down were to show/tell their audiences that it was promoting deadly virus-spreading behaviors like these.

 

[*Psyche*]

Here's the problem with using that kind of plan to try & end one's life... it's not guaranteed. An individual's reaction to catching COVID varies widely from person to person. One could have deadly symptoms, while another could catch it from that individual & still be asymptomatic.

So, encouraging people to go maskless, not get the vaccine, or do any other irresponsible action that could cause them to get COVID is pointless. That's not encouraging people to commit suicide. That's just encouraging people to be idiots.

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

The people who are against this site are probably the type to be roaming about maskless and unvaccinated themselves so I doubt they would use that against this site even if it just so happened that anyone from here held those same views but maybe I'm wrong and they're really stupid enough to not see the irony when going about their daily lives.

 

[seaweaves]

I think this a reasonable worry: one way to escalate attention to the site is to fabricate further evidence of the possible harms of the site.

But, I'd add that while there is the chance of malicious misinformation, there is generally a lot of unintentionally under-informed or mis-informed advice on this site already.

Sometimes this is for individual reasons (for example, we all have our own experiences, and sometimes overgeneralize from those specific experiences and circumstances [just look at recent posts and how many people trust they know what is or isn't legal, despite us often living in very different places]). Often times this is for reasons more outside our control (for example, I doubt many of us have direct paywall-free access to academic journals and studies; suicide stigma leads to a lot of misinformation, and different countries and legal jurisdictions will lead to competing legal or personal advice, etc).

I think with this in mind, the main thing is to make sure we're holding each other accountable, without assuming misinformation is necessarily deliberate. Hopefully we're all acting this way already of course.

One thing the NYT did was post a deliberately one-sided representation of what happens in these forums, with very little attention to internal disagreements or the fact that we aren't one big uniform mass of people. So holding each other accountable to our information etc is also an important part of optics beyond keeping each other safer (if a person is maliciously encouraging or misinforming members, but other responses call that out, then its harder to say "look what's happening on this site" since there will be direct contradictions in the same threads etc).

Tl;dr, because that got accidentally long, while I think it's very reasonable to worry about these kinds of intruders, I think there's also some fairly straightforward steps we can take as individuals and should take even if nobody's acting the way this thread worries about, since we all make mistakes and have our own knowledges to share.

 

[noaccount]

Here's the problem with using that kind of plan to try & end one's life... it's not guaranteed. An individual's reaction to catching COVID varies widely from person to person. One could have deadly symptoms, while another could catch it from that individual & still be asymptomatic.

So, encouraging people to go maskless, not get the vaccine, or do any other irresponsible action that could cause them to get COVID is pointless. That's not encouraging people to commit suicide. That's just encouraging people to be idiots.

Right. Sorry if I didn't phrase this clearly.
The people I'm objecting to, aren't people who say they'll 'commit suicide by getting covid,' or encouraging others to get covid as a suicide method. They're *just* encouraging people to go around maskless... for the hell of it. Because screw everyone else, screw essential workers and elders and the disabled.
You're right, of course, trying to get covid as a suicide method is also a horrible idea for many reasons. Not all that likely to work and one of the most slow excruciating painful ways to go if it does kill you.
...Okay. Apparently, in the original thread where this was happening, the mods now deleted both the "it's fine to go maskless wherever you want and actually masks are *causing* the pandemic" bullshit posts from peacefultonic, and also my replies to those posts. Thanks mods.