4chan (and even more so, 8chan) are the pure essence of no censorship, yet everything from Holocaust denial to rampant racism and sexism thrive and fester and spread. The most persuasive ideas are those that are short, easy to digest, and blame someone who's not you for your misery. The truth, well, it can be messy and complicated, and I'm not sure you can get there without shutting down the puerile voices screaming memes of hatred.
Yet this is not the case. Why?
Facebook isn’t required by law to pull down the video. They pull down the video because it’s not profitable (shareholders)
4chan is an example of a pure free market of ideas. Yet only the most toxic of ideologies seem to survive. Why is this the case?
You can find the same content on reddit that you find in 4chan. The difference is Condé Nast will remove subreddits because it looks bad and hurts their bottom line. 4chan doesn’t have share holders, they barely have advertisers.
Toxic ideologies survives on the Chan because there is no one worried about profit there’s no one to answer to. The entire internet use to be the same way.
However, censorship is exactly the wrong thing to do.
If these pockets of knowledge are cordoned off, and inaccessible to causal observers then fewer people will know about them. There will be less people who are well versed in the ideas, and as a result fewer who are able to identify and explain their limits and context. This makes it far easier to radicalize folks.
It's also super intuitive, of course censorship increases radicalization. That's why a corrupt government censors, to have better control of and more precisely manipulate their beliefs. Something that wouldn't be possible if everyone had more information.
So yeah, I disagree.