Historically, states have been the foremost perpetrators of propaganda and conspiracy theories. Democracies are not immune. See the propaganda efforts surrounding the Vietnam and Iraq wars, just the top of a very long list. The protest movements against these wars were so powerful and inspirational because the state had so little power to suppress them. Similar movements in Russia and China essentially do not and can not exist.
State power is a ratchet. Limits on state power, once removed, do not come back. Every power we give to the state today will be used against us decades from now, in an utterly different context, with utterly different people in charge. Giving away limits only makes sense to stave off imminent demise, which, panicked op-eds aside, is not what we face today.
I mostly agree with the people who currently have the most power to censor speech. My interests and viewpoints would be advanced by increased state censorship. But I am still against it for the reasons above.
I'm more okay with private companies deciding these things, because other private companies can do things differently. They do not have the monopoly on power that the state does. I think a cultural norm favoring free speech should apply, but it's reasonable for platforms to apply judgment to set more limits.
From your previous posts, I thought you were not okay at all with private companies regulating speech on their platforms.
I guess this is why the best opinion-havers write essays instead of hot takes in the comment section.
Yeah, I just don't think this is true. I think a lot of progress has been agnostic in this sense--i.e., "free speech" in the sense that modern advocates of the term use it had nothing to do with, e.g., the invention of automobiles. Was it the yellow journalism of the late 19th/early 20th century that gave us any of the progress of those eras? It was instead property rights and basic rule-of-law things.
> For example, there has historically been intense stigma for expressing skepticism of the local religion, and scientists have famously suffered for it.
Again, a problem that wasn't solved via allowing every grandmother to be exposed to and propagate conspiracy theories; if anything, one might argue, those biases might have been continually reinforced if everyone had their say. Query whether the kinds of people who have brought about the positive changes to which you allude were analogous to Fauci or whether they were analogous to Breitbart.