> When 1984 and "Orwellian" are used as a catch-all for any type of oppression or even any type of propaganda, I think it does a great disservice.

I agree, but it's not hard to make a stronger case. Organizations like Google, Facebook and Twitter centrally decide Truth, and then penalize anyone who posts anything in conflict with their version. Google censors the videos of people who dare to disagree with e.g. the WHO. Facebook deboosts "vaccine hesitancy"; Twitter sabotages the engagement of people with a diverse set of "wrong" opinions, degrades the various subnetworks by silently deleting followers, annotates tweets with the Official Truth, etc.

The same thing is done here on HN, a kind of filtering that assumes its own hypothesis. Someone posts something contrary to the prevailing story? Well, if it conflicts with the WHO, it must be conspiracy theory junk. I don't recognize this site, so I'm going to flag this article. People seem sure they know what the truth is, so they feel comfortable squashing anything that conflicts with their current understanding.

At some level you always need a way to filter out noise, so quality have to improve to get signal.

Begging the question. There are highly qualified people like Sucharit Bhakdi who are being declared conspiracy theorists for no other reason than that they are going against officially sanctioned truth. Which is the high-quality signal, the NYT or Bhakdi? One is held up as authoritative by those in power, one is suppressed in the hopes that it will not even be considered. If delusion and propaganda gains prominence, filtering the truth might seem like filtering noise.

I think the core problem here is giving away your powers to amoral corporations.