private message sent to me:

Have you ever noticed that lots of posts in that sub have insane amounts of upvotes but only a very small number of comments as if the upvotes come from bots? I've also come across quite a few posts containing a large number of bizarre comments that use almost the exact same unique language but from several different users as they are also not legitimately coming from multiple people. Seems like reddit is targeted by bots for creating the impression that the site's users are more heavily provax than they really are. Pro-vax nonsense memes and social media post garbage make to the front page every day. Any thoughts on this? I'd make a discussion post about it but I'm lazy.

my reply:

i have been watching the vaccine debate closely for 5 years. what i saw happen was that each round of debate would go a little longer than before. so lets say the first round of debate goes A,B,C,D,E and at that point the pro-vaccine side ran out of moves/arguments at E... but then the next time that same argument would be had, ostensibly by a different user, it would go A,B,C,D,E,F,G before the pro-vaccine side ran out of arguments/moves.

so what appeared to be happening was that there was a round-table think-tank of pro-vaccine people, who would document all of our arguments, and then put them into a flow-chart like if anti-vaccine says A, then pro-vaccine rebut with B, and if anti-vaccine rebut with M, then pro-vaccine rebut with N, etc. it was the same scripted rebuttals each time you try a different anti-vaccine argument. so once they discovered a new argument that they didn't have an answer for, they would immediately stop the debate, and have a round-table on how to answer.

once they had their answer, every pro-vaccine person seems to spontaneously come up with the same scripted rebuttal the next time you deploy that anti-vaccine argument.

so i think what happened over time was that each side pushed the other side deeper down the rabbit hole of vaccines, with the anti-vaccine people already knowing what was down the rabbit hole, or at least being mentally prepared for disturbing new discoveries, and the pro-vaccine side only superficially understanding vaccines, and utterly un-prepared to face the disturbing new discoveries they found.

and, because the pro-vaxxers are all working on the same problem together, and have the same scripted answers, they are all getting a little bit more "red pilled" every day, as they try to rebut the next anti-vaccine argument

like, the pro-vaccine people are mentally prepared to debate vaccines and autism, but totally unprepared to debate vaccines and SIDS. they were prepared to rebut their own strawman arguments, but totally unprepared to rebut actual anti-vaccine arguments.

so over time, the pro-vaccine people slowly came to understand the problems with vaccines the way the anti-vaxxes understood the problems, and the pro-vaxxers knew they were screwed. they knew they couldn't keep going down these rabbit holes, dragging both anti-vaccine and pro-vaccine thinkers into the debate, and being exposed day after day, without the public "waking up" to the problems with vaccines

so they decided to try and shut down vaccine conversations all together, by labeling anything bad that is said about vaccines as "misinformation", and then pushing false narrative about a measles outbreak at disneyland, or in a jewish neighborhood, and blame it on anti-vaccine misinformation. then they push for the social media companies to crack-down on anti-vaccine misinformation, which many of them have done, and censored users and/or their anti-vaccine content

http://www.reddit.com/r/VaxxHappened