I would argue that the real gas on the conspiracy fire is the combination of the ad/attention based internet economy and the power of algorithms. They plug in data and tell algorithms to increase viewing time and clicks, however you can. Well, it turns out that of all the topics people are interested in, outrage is one of the best ways to keep people engaged and to encourage them to engage others. So when person X clicks on one news item questioning vaccine safety, the algorithm starts sprinkling in more inflammatory articles and a few videos. So they click on a couple. Which leads them to groups of other people that reinforce the belief and leads to more clicks and more viewership. Very quickly, most of their online experience shows them that vaccines never worked, that it is a government hoax, and there are a plethora of “experts” to back up and continually reinforce this idea. We seem to have accidentally automated conspiracy theory propagation.

Actually, I would say the problem with censorship is that it rarely stops at a good place. It might start from good intentions, but eventually we're shushing people that go against the herd without actually knowing they're wrong.

In this case, it seems pretty obvious that there aren't microchips in vaccines. I'm not even sure what those chips would do, or how they'd work.

But what if some day the government really did do that, or something else that seems ridiculous? We'll be censoring anyone who tries to tell us otherwise.

And 1 step worse: The government could order YouTube/etc to do that censoring, and it'll look like it's just their normal thing.

The problem with censorship is that legit and valuable free speech will eventually be restricted.

Don't be fooled by the pro-censorship narrative (although that is course the point of censorship).

Claiming people believe there are microchips physically inside vaccines is a major distortion of what these people think. In fact even the Reuters article doesn't say that. It's the age-old tactic of making up something ludicrous that sounds vaguely like a group's concerns and then claiming they all believe it so they shouldn't be listened to.

What they are concerned about is the creation of a system that enables rapid marking of people to identify if they've had certain vaccines or not. Sometimes this surfaces as talk about "quantum dots" or "dot tattoos" which is a reference to research into a way to imprint codes underneath people's skin. The microchip idea comes from the fact that this is already done for animals (rfid tags).

This provokes concern in many people for similar reasons to the (supposed) Chinese notion of 'social credit': the point of tagging the population with a physical marker of compliance is to enable very efficient stripping of their rights if they haven't complied. Sort of a step short of imprisonment. For instance, some politicians already talk of blocking air travel for anyone who wasn't vaccinated (against many kinds of things).

Now if you trust vaccines, no problem. But scientists are busy setting fire to their trust in all sorts of ways so the population of people who don't trust them will only increase:

1. Rapid "moonshot" vaccine development programmes that are skipping the long testing process usually involved.

2. Rising awareness of how politicised academia has become. See the other story about Nature magazine.

3. A Swine Flu vaccine that caused neurological damage in a small number of cases (but Swine Flu hurt a tiny number of people too, so the cure was worse than the disease in this case).

4. Insistence on a waiver of liability for vaccine manufacturers.

5. Many examples of low standards or making contradictory statements about viruses and COVID.

6. Demanding that anyone criticising them is silenced.

And so on. The list could go on all day. Point is, it's entirely rational to be lowering trust in scientists at the moment, so any effective system of tracking and enforcement around their decisions is going to be legitimately controversial. You don't have to be a tinfoil hat wearer to observe that standards have been considerably loosened around vaccines this year.