That’s the means. Putting things on paper or on air has no value in itself; it’s having a viable avenue to have them heard and propagated that’s important. (It doesn’t matter that you typed your samizdat issue on your own typewriter and not commandeered a printing press, you’re still going to prison. Hell, as we know nailing a piece of paper to a church door can be bad enough.)

The point is that public thought stagnates and rots once it’s impossible to publish dissenting opinions and a sucking swamp of apparent conformity sets in; and a central government is inordinately efficient at enforcing such conformity. So it shouldn’t get the chance to.

I’d expect that when that when the idea was first being established, a government was perhaps the only entity with wide enough reach to enforce this. (Maybe along with a couple of paragovernments like the Catholic Church and the India Companies.) That’s not the case today. It’s telling that GP mentions a radio broadcaster, because radio caused a centralization of news like nothing before it (as often outside the direct control of governments as under it), and while the Internet had an opportunity to reverse that, except for a brief moment it did not.

Ah, so its like a lifehack for governments - they never arrests you, but mysteriously everyone who disagrees with them is shadowbanned in every form of social media. No dissenting opinion is ever heard, so they get what they want.

And we still technically have freedom of the press?

That indeed works in China where they can ban you in every form of social media because they have active controls built in at every level. But China doesn't pretend to have freedom of the press either.

In the West, how does the government shadowban me from my own Mastodon instance and my own hosted blog? Or Truth Social or Gab?

Do they need to? For most people, if you band them from twitter/YouTube etc, the job is done. They aren't gonna out up their own website and the number if independant blogs is small

But that’s not a freedom of the press question. These private platforms are only some fifteen years old. TikTok’s rise and Twitter’s fumbles demonstrate that their market positions are not permanent.