The Hateful Side of Internet Freedom

Today I was asked by WordPress to moderate a comment that I found hateful and even disturbing.  You can read it on my post about the adenovirus vaccine.  I approved the comment because I’m not afraid of anonymous threats.  You can assume, however, that I sleep with a loaded shotgun at hand.

This comment displayed several hallmarks of the hateful, anonymous Internet statements that you see on every web site.  The first was its irrelevancy.  The commenter wanted to make a statement about the way children are vaccinated by pediatricians and family practicioners.  However, my post had nothing to do with current immunization practices for children.

The second hallmark was its polarized attitude.  The comment assumed that I approved of current pediatric immunization practices, and that the practices are not just wrong but evil.  In fact, I have not made any statement whatsoever on that topic.

The third hallmark was its threatening nature: the commenter claimed I should be jailed for not respecting the sensitivity of the human body after being trained for medicine.  This is absurd.  I never made any statement that suggested that I didn’t respect, etc.  and if I DID– how is jailing me going to improve the situation?  A death threat would be more appropriate.

The commenter made assumptions about my position that were inappropriate and unsupported by any statements I actually made; then, the commenter made statements that were completely irrelevant to my post.  If you’ve forgotten, my post was about the adenovirus vaccine for military recruits.  Research has shown that this vaccine is lifesaving for new soldiers undergoing stressful basic training.  I also mentioned the anthrax vaccine, which is dangerous and completely unnecessary for soldiers (unless we assume that the military has weaponized anthrax and intends to use it in the field where our soldiers would be exposed to it.)

This comment betrays the intellectual poverty of the commenter: he/she is so obsessed with hatred for vaccinations (or is it just pediatricians?) that he/she mentally transforms every mention of any vaccine into a call for giving “eight or nine vaccinations at one visit” to children having their physicals.  Then the commenter applies whatever sanction he/she feels appropriate to the imagined bad attitude that I supposedly displayed.

This type of behavior will only reduce the level of the Internet to an interaction between children in the schoolyard.