You're basically saying, I don't worry about abuse of power because there will always be some check on it, no matter how ineffectual. That just flies in the face of every time someone managed to use their power to overcome whatever checks were in place.
And this is like a constant theme in history. All the checks on Ceaser's power didn't prevent the Roman Republic from falling.
No
My birth place influences my position a lot. After the end of the war we enshrined the principle of 'militant democracy' in our basic law. Giving the state and its institutions the explicit power to deal with threats to the constitutional order, not repeating the mistakes of the weakened government of the Weimar period that gave rise to unchecked extremist forces.
To bring it back to the topic of the US and Facebook. To me the censorship is not a sign of authoritarianism or anything, but lack of strong institutions. In the face of rising extremism and disorder Facebook effectively has to step in and do something to their best ability because in general the US has very few tools to deal with this at a democratic level.
When I see pictures of someone dressed as a shaman on the dais of the senate and lawmakers cowering behind benches it's very weird to me to draw the conclusion that the pressing issue is too much authority and not enough freedom of expression.
Obviously you don't want to dismiss a growing problem, but things seem much more manageable today than during these past incidents.
Yes, because society has a plurality of institutions that constrain power. Restrictions (even speech restrictions themselves) are subject to the court of public opinion (we're talking about them right now), there's the judiciary, political opposition and so on.
This argument never had any pull for me for the same reason I'm against abolishing the police or abolishing surveillance or anything else. Power, even in the hands of people I don't like, can't be exercised arbitrarily.