"Big tech" decided to ban people for being hateful to others on their platforms. Those platforms don't exist for your protection against government actors. Nor should it.
People agree with censorship if it's in in agreement with their belief.
Obscenity laws are kind of different, since it's perfectly possible to add or remove obscenities from an utterance without substantially affecting the message. I'm not saying I agree with such laws, just stating the facts. What are examples where specific types of messages were banned? E.g. hate speech laws, blasphemy laws, lese majeste laws, etc. In Western democracies, the only examples that come to mind are recent.
>People agree with censorship if it's in in agreement with their belief.
Agreed, generally speaking.
Geez, what did I say that was so disagreeable? This is why I don't have a permanent account here. Whatever.
Of course, my point is seemingly unpopular in very partisan websites where it's seen as a rep/dem or left/right issue (US centric) but the fact that we see more and more of these types of articles (today an EFF one) shows there's more of us, concerned by this arbitrating of truth by a certain group of ideologes and the people who agree with them where they leverage their power to prescribe what speech is worth transmitting and which is worth censoring.
First it was to "combat hate", that speech was limited according to what partisan big tech companies decided was fair. It was said it had real-life consequences. Harm. So it should be banned.
Then anything from certain parties or ideologies became hate if labeled so by the tech giants. So out they went.
Now, anything questioning the authoritarian narrative of the pandemic is labeled as such.
The slippery slope that people tried to deny with claims of "private companies" has gotten higher and keeps going deeper.
Talking about freedom, freedom of speech or human rights gets you mocked in certain spaces. It's mind-boggling.