I also wouldn’t be holding up 1880-1900 journalism as an example of accuracy — you’re describing the period of salacious Jack the Ripper stories. Is that your best example of censorship working out positively — that tabloid era in journalism?
I’m asking you where this has led to positive things; not contesting the rights of Twitter.
But actually, I think there is something lost when Twitter no longer hosts flat Earth debates: the ability to convincingly explain why the Earth isn’t flat requires practice and refinement; and to know that the Earth isn’t flat requires we allow the idea to be challenged.
You don’t seem able to think of a case that censors showed a clear benefit to society — but there’s several in the past few years where they haven’t:
- Hunter Biden story may as well have been election interference
- somehow, deaths are spiking beyond COVID — quite possibly as a result of COVID policies; we never had a genuine debate over what to do
- similarly, multiple countries have pulled COVID vaccines for kids due to the risk of myocarditis… which has been known all along, but was censored from discussion
I was hoping to see a convincing historic example, cut free from modern politics so I could assess it fairly — but there don’t seem to be any examples where censorship generated positives to offset the huge negatives I see happening at present.
Not under the rules you specified, no. I'm not a scholar of newspaper history.
After 1900, I can invoke the history of the FCC. By regulating access to the finite resource of bandwidth, they created an interesting circumstance: what you could say on television was regulated because your license could be revoked for failure to uphold a standard that protected the American living room. And for a long, long time: it worked! It worked quite well. There was a broad variety of television and radio available, it was broadly inoffensive, It generally reported the truth and / or was entertaining, and it had a certain national cohesion promotion effect that we've utterly lost in this era of unregulated mass communication. Speaking of, those regulations began to be undermined in the Reagan era, which is when Saturday morning cartoons became feature length commercials for toys. It's hard for me to claim that's an improvement over the previous regulations.
Could you get everything? Not from television. And that was fine. If somebody wanted to broadcast a message, they either needed a sympathetic ear in the media or they needed to own a station.
And that's the key thing, because when you use the term censorship, you're not talking about censorship. You've been consistently talking about who has control over broadcast. You've been consistently calling a private company's decision to not rebroadcast a signal sent to them "censorship" as if we should have any right to the resources of a private corporation. If anything, Twitter looks like a broadcast channel sitting on a non-finite resource. Since the resource is not finite, the government lacks the interest in regulating who uses it that it had for airwaves, which is fine. But those who demand some sort of fairness in how it chooses what it retransmits are asking for a massive prior restraint on its freedom to do with its service what it will that has no precedent. And the precedent it sets opens a huge can of worms.
If some government authority can mandate Twitter has to discuss flat earth, can they also mandate it has to give a platform to Nazis? That'll be incompatible with the law of several countries, for starters. It's also broadly incompatible with the American tradition of the press. You can't force NBC to platform Nazis. You can't force the New York times to give Nazis column inches. What the (US) government is restrained from doing is shutting down the Nazi newspaper and preventing the Nazi candidate from applying to the ballot using the same rules that every candidate does. Nowhere does the law require us to allow them to use our resources to promote their message. Not even a billboard operator is required to do business with them, no matter how green their money is... The law just prevents the government from restraining them from setting up their own billboard under the general rules of billboards.
Twitter belongs to Twitter and none of us have the right to force it to retransmit any damn thing we say. Their pipes, their storage, their servers, their rules. We should host a blog if we don't like it.
I don't know why you're constraining the time frame to pre-1900, but sure.
From 1899 prior, almost every time a newspaper decided not to report something that they believed was false. Because by and large, newspapers do a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff and reporting stories that at least seem to be true. What they don't do is report, without editorial insight, everything they could. They don't publish every letter to the editor, they don't run every story a reporter chases, and they never have. Filtering is part of their job. We remember the errors in filtering (especially if it's a good newspaper because they will report a retraction or correction) but there isn't too terribly much evidence in black and white of the dozens of decisions editors make to not amplify the noise. Obviously, since it didn't end up in a paper.
There are people in the world who believe the Earth is flat. Nobody is under any obligation to spread that belief. I'm not saying Twitter should start censoring discussion of flat Earth, but it's up to them if they choose to.
I guess the result is it wouldn't be a very welcoming channel for discussion of flat Earth topics. Nothing really lost there, I guess someone will have to set up a forum for it.