> Of course you can do it in theory. The question is, whether you can do it today and whether those attempts will turn out more dangerous than helpful.

Allow me to restate my position more precisely. I believe the supresion of information has worked in the past. And based on this I will need very compelling evidence to convince me that we live in a special time when it is impossible and no longer is effective.

I'm happy to be wrong but am skeptical when people begin claiming their circumstances are special in history.

The article itself makes the arguments for this. One, hate speech just rebrands. Two, the assumption that what you want censored is what will get censored is false, especially if you feel you are the marginalized group already. So what censorship is effective? Pushing existing already popular ideas that are widely held already. This makes censorship basically useless, and more so creates problems for anyone who doesn’t strictly believe I the most popular ideas. Flat earth is a perfect example of an idea that doesn’t get censored and doesn’t need to be because culture already accepts it is wrong. The truth is almost all ideas don’t need censorship for the same reason flat earth doesn’t. We already make violence and calls to violence illegal which is the generally accepted tipping point of interfering with someone’s life. Censoring views that some may lead to violence is starting to get into a gray area, and censoring views that are just “hate” goes well beyond gray to pure opinion of the person interpreting and we don’t want to give tech companies the ability to deem their interpretation of what we say as “hate” when it has no basis.

> The article itself makes the arguments for this. One, hate speech just rebrands. Two, the assumption that what you want censored is what will get censored is false,

I don't believe either point is true. For example, the concerted efforts to silence, defame and de-platform socialists in 1950s America were highly effect.

And further, while you maybe can make an argument that it wasn't possible ten years ago, we're headed in a very centralized direction at this point. There are basically three places where broad populations can engage in discourse/recruit/radicalize and there may be fewer in another ten years.

> Of course you can do it in theory.

It worked practically in practice in history. It works also practically in countries like Saudi Arabia. Once in a while censorship does not manage to stop all opposition, which is why once in a while revolutions and such succeed.

But practically speaking, censorship works. That does not makes it right thing to do or something, which would be different claim.

Just because people manage to say censored things here and there just means it cant stop completely all such claims and materials. But it does minimize who will run into them, how many of them will be available and so on.

China?