Because people tend to be cattle and eliminating the echo chamber of targeted political advertising is a good thing. If you want your message out there let everyone see it and call you out for your lies, whatever your party or end game. I prefer twitter's method of just cutting it out, but Goog hit the middle ground I suppose and only let advertisers aim more generic target audience like age and sex.

false claims are not transparency. false claims are the opposite of transparency. When you allow lies to spread unchecked, real transparency is meaningless because the true information exposed by the transparency can be drowned out by the false information.

Honestly, i don't even know where to begin with being asked to explain why lies are bad

The problem is that most political speech is rarely simple facts with true/false values. Political speech is complicated and full of nuance and ambiguities. Just look at the example that AOC grilled Zuckerberg over: "Republicans support the Green New Deal". Which Republicans? Which version of the Green New Deal? Which parts of it?

Ultimately you're just handing control over speech to the arbiters of "true" and "false", who are themselves political creatures.

Sometimes we just have to accept some bad things in our society, because the consequence of eliminating them is worse. See also: The War On Drugs.

I'm asking what false claims you think are "controlling our political process", and causing a "large problem" in the world?

It seems to me that good old fashioned state/media propaganda are a much larger problem than any false claims circulating on the internet.

This is a great example because (1) is not universally true and (2) is a caricature of what anti-vaxxers claim.

Anti-vaxxers are probably incorrect, but you are also the victim of a misinformation campaign. Limiting them doesn't help you get better information.

1 is so close to true that it's a basically harmless statement. 2 is flat out true, anti-vaxxers have no scientific basis for their claims and they are essentially murdering people including small kids. so yeah 2 is just as ridiculous as was states.

> 1 is so close to true that it's a basically harmless statement.

It is indeed a very dangerous statement, because it leads the scientifically illiterate to think that they don't need to speak frankly with their doctor for health advice. For example, your 'harmless' statement led to my brother incorrectly receiving the MMR vaccine. You see, he has hemophilia ,which is a contra-indication to receive the vaccine. Hemophilia is relatively common enough (because, according to the CDC, any blood clotting disorder that extends bleeding time, is a contraindication for MMR). He ended up having severe seizures as a child.

Or moreover, neither my daughter nor I should (or should have, in my case) receive the MMR vaccine as infants due to a family history of sometimes severe immune issues. These are also relatively common conditions.

I'm not an anti-vaxxer, BTW. I'm just following CDC recommendations, to the T: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/should-not-vacc.html

Neither of this means that most people should receive MMR. But not everyone should. MMR is not 100% safe. No vaccine is, even if the general benefits outweigh the cons.

It's possible for anti-vaxxers to simultaneously be a net harm to children while having reasonable concerns about some aspects of our current best practices regarding vaccines. Regardless, dismissing them and calling them murderers doesn't seem helpful towards stopping them or addressing their fears.

“Close to true” is still false. The medical community isn’t doing itself any favours (with regards to their credibility) by espousing false “almost truths”. The fact is that vaccines are not (100%) safe (no medical procedure is) - it’s just that the tiny risk vs huge reward makes them worth it.

Thanks for encouraging me to be more precise in my examples. Looking at the rest of this thread, I can see my mistake.

Ironically, I thought this would be a better choice than a Brexit/the EU example.

> Exactly one of the following two claims is a lie:

No, a lie is a deception carried out by means of an untrue statement. "1 + 1 = 3" is not a lie, but an accountant claiming such in order to embezzle is lying.

> 1) “Vaccines are safe” > 2) “Vaccines cause, rather than prevent, illnesses”.

For the sake of getting at the deeper problem with this argument, I'll grant that a version of these assertions could be roughly mutually exclusive.

> If 1 is true, the antivaxx movement is risking tens of millions of lives and >>billions of disability adjusted years of life expectancy.

> If 2 is true, vaccines are a multibillion dollar fraud.

You've framed this as though it's hard to believe that the antivaxx movement would risk people dying and becoming disabled.

Many positions impose a potentially high death toll if you're wrong, e.g. both sides of the debates on war, guns, climate change, health care.

In an alternate history, Neville Chamberlain could have been the man who brokered "peace in our time." He believed he was right and, correctly, believed going to war would be bloody and awful, and took actions based on those beliefs.

But we typically have little direct influence over policy, so what dominates people's views is the immediate impact they observe. In that "multibillion dollar fraud" you have countless doctors and pharmacists administering vaccines to people they know, watching them get sick, and shrugging it off to collect a paycheck.

Unless medical school filters for people who are profoundly unethical, that's not happening.

I appreciate that you’re giving the benefit of the doubt to what was, in retrospect, a poorly written dichotomy on my part.

However, I can’t follow the point you’re making. If it isn’t too much to ask for an internet stranger, could I ask you to rephrase that?

while i dont believe this to be the case with vaccines:

they can be non-complicit with it and still unknowingly participate in the fraud.

ultimately, the doctors have to trust their data as well, which can - theoretically! - be manufactured in order to sell snake oil equivalent.

its a vanishingly small chance with vaccinations, but nonetheless a possibility which cant be outright denied.

the sad thing about this is that we're almost guaranteed to have a situation like that at some point. it will likely be a significantly less widespread topic than vaccines, but there is too much money to be made with this for nobody to make an attempt. to be honest, i expect that there is already at least some medication like that in circulation and we just don't know about it (nor the doctors which prescribe them).

Antivax has plenty influence on politics. They've been able to push states to allow more and more capability to dodge vaccines when they should be mandatory unless there is a medically compelling reason not to.

The antivaxx movement recently had an impact on CDC policy, Department of Education involvement at Federal and State levels on how to handle unvaccinated kids, laws passed by State Governors, and two Senate bills. I'm not sure how you're able to minimize their impact on politics.

There are clear links between false statements, the antivaxx movement and the resurgence of deadly medical conditions.

Um, my kid caught a disease from a live-virus vaccine and then spread it to younger family members, so if we're being totally honest here...