>But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.

It turns out being able to lie at scale is a more credible and more immediate threat to society than nuanced restrictions on the flow of information.

If you play any Town of Salem style game, you know that being able to call out and dissuade low effort, poor quality information is a way to improve pro-social discourse. Are there issues with selecting what counts as anti social information? Yes. Which is why restrictions are typically exceedingly narrow.

However the ambit of what restrictions are justifiable runs along a spectrum; even amongst western democracies, there is a dramatic difference in what is acceptable and what is not. Germany, for instance, has exceedingly strong restrictions on pro-nazi speech. The US, by contrast, places a far higher immediate value on freedom of speech, to the point that it struck down campaign finance laws as being of lesser importance.

Times change and people are noticing that the result of the pendulum being so far swung in one direction on this issue has caused tremendously deleterious effects.