Comment by softwaredoug

> There's a huge difference between government censorship and forcing private companies to host content they don't want to host on servers they own.

It really depends. I remember after the Christchurch mosque shootings, there was a scramble to block the distribution of the shooter's manifesto. In some countries, the government could declare the content illegal directly, but in others, such as Australia, they didn't have pre-existing laws sufficiently wide to cover that, and so what happened in practice is that ISPs "proactively" formed a voluntary censorship cartel, acting in lockstep to block access to all copies of the manifesto, while the government was working on the new laws. If the practical end result is the same - a complete country block on some content - does it really matter whether it's dressed up as public or private censorship?

And with large tech companies like Alphabet and Meta, it is a particularly pointed question given how much the market is monopolized.

It can simultaneously be legal/allowable for them to ban speech, and yet also the case that we should criticize them for doing so. The first amendment only restricts the government, but a culture of free speech will also criticize private entities for taking censorious actions. And a culture of free speech is necessary to make sure that the first amendment is not eventually eroded away to nothing.

The line should be what is illegal, which, at least in the US, is fairly permissive.

The legal process already did all the hard work of reaching consensus/compromise on where that line is, so just use that. At least with the legal system, there's some degree of visibility and influence possible by everyone. It's not some ethics department silently banning users they don't agree with.

The middle ground is when a company becomes a utility. The power company can't simply disconnect your electricity because they don't feel like offering it to you, even though they own the power lines. The phone company can't disconnect your call because they disagree with what you're saying, even though they own the transmission equipment.

The thing is that people will tell you it wasn’t actually censorship because for them it was only the government being a busy body nosey government telling the tech corps about a select number of people violating their terms (nudge nudge please do something)… so I think the and/or is important.

There's a literal world of literature both contemporary and classical which points to the idea that concentrations of power in politics and concentrations of wealth and power in industry aren't dissimilar. I think there are limits to this as recent commentaries by guys like Zizek seem to suggest that the, "strong Nation-State" is a positive legacy of the European enlightenment. I think this is true, "when it is."

Power is power. Wealth is power. Political power is power. The powerful should not control the lives or destinies of the less powerful. This is the most basic description of contemporary democracy but becomes controversial when the Randroids and Commies alike start to split hairs about how the Lenins and John Galts of the world have a right to use power to further their respective political objectives.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm (Leviathan by Hobbes)

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50922 (Perpetual Peace by Kant)

https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...

No, they ban your account and exclude you from the market commons if they don't like what you say.

If the furry smut people became the dominant force in literature and your company was driven out of business fairly for not producing enough furry smut would that too constitute censorship?

I want to see how steep this hill you're willing to die on is. What's that old saying-- that thing about the shoe being on the other foot?

Let's say that in the future that the dominant form of entertainment is X-rated animal snuff films for whatever reason. Would a lack of alternative content constitute an attack on your right to choose freely or speak? Given your ethical framework I'd have to say, "no" but even as your discursive opponent I would have to admit that if you as a person are adverse to, "X-rated furry smut" that I would sympathize with you as the oppressed if it meant your ability to live and communicate has been stifled or called into question. Oppression has many forms and many names. The Johnny Conservatarians want to reserve certain categories of cruelty as, "necessary" or, "permissable" by creating frameworks like, "everything is permitted just as long as some social condition is met..."

At the crux of things the libertarians and the non-psychos are just having a debate on when it's fair game to be unethical or cruel to others in the name of extending human freedom and human dignity. We've fallen so far from the tree.

I have a consortium of other website owners who refuse to crosslink your materials unless you put our banner on your site. Is this oppression? Oppression goes both ways, has many names, and takes many forms. Its most insidious form being the Oxford Comma.

The government told me to.

Is andy99's personal webpage a de-facto commons where the public congregates to share and exchange ideas?

Libraries are typically run by the government. Governments aren't supposed to censor speech. Private platforms are a different matter by law.

Crazy how fast we got from “please remove health misinformation during a pandemic” (bad) to “FCC chair says government will revoke broadcast licenses for showing comedians mocking the president” (arguably considerably worse).

Also allowing it to be posted initially for a period of time before being taken down feels worse than simply preventing it from ever being published on your platform to begin with.

Of course they would never check things before allowing them to be posted because there isn’t any profit in that.

If we were still in the age of personal blogs and phpbb forums, where there were thousands of different venues - the fact the chess forum would ban you for discussing checkers was no problem at all.

But these days, when you can count the forums on one hand even if you're missing a few fingers, and they all have extremely similar (American-style) censorship policies? To me it's less clear than it once was.

No because you are perfectly technically capable of setting your own servers in a colo and distributing your video.

yes... coz youtube is not your ISP. A literal massive difference. RE: net neutrality.

“Covid” related search results were definitely hard-coded or given a hand-tuned boost. Wikipedia was landing on the 2nd or 3rd page which never happens for a general search term on Google.

I’d even search for “coronavirus” and primarily get “official” sites about Covid-19 even tho that’s just one of many coronaviruses. At least Wikipedia makes the front page again, with the Covid-19 page outranking the coronavirus page…

“Covid” related search results were definitely hard-coded. Wikipedia was landing on the 2nd or 3rd page which never happens.

I’d even search for “coronavirus” and primarily get “official” sites about Covid-19 even tho that’s just one of many coronaviruses. At least Wikipedia makes the front page again, with the Covid-19 page outranking the coronavirus page…

I 100% agree with your sentiment here Jensson but in Googling, "common carrier law" what I get are the sets of laws governing transportation services liability:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

Is there perhaps another name for what you're describing? It piques my interest.

The US has pretty much given up on antitrust enforcement. That's the big problem.

The federal government was literally pressuring ABC to take Kimmel off the air. Even Ted Cruz and other prominent republicans said that was a bridge too far.

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

Section 230 does not work like you think it does. In fact it is almost opposite of what you probably think it does. The whole point was to allow them to have it both ways.

It makes sites not count as the publisher or speaker of third party content posted to their site, even if they remove or moderate that third party content.

YouTube’s business model probably wouldn’t work if they were made to be responsible for all the content they broadcasted. It would be really interesting to see a world where social media companies were treated as publishers.

Might be a boon for federated services—smaller servers, finer-grained units of responsibility…

> It's often a lot better to just let kooks speak freely.

They have always been able to speak freely. I still see vaccine conspiracies on HN to this day. It was rampant during COVID as well.

It's less about censorship and more about more people becoming middle-class and therefore thinking they're smarter than researchers.

There is nobody more confident in themselves than the middle-class.

It isn't hard to find that randomized controlled trials and large meta-analyses show that COVID vaccines are highly effective. No need to rely on media. You can point to one or two observational re-analyses that show otherwise but overall they are not particularly convincing given the large body of easily accessible other evidence.

I appreciate you.

People have become more anti-Vax because the Covid vaccines were at best ineffective and as you said anything contra-narrative is buried or ignored.

If you push a shitty product and force people to take it to keep their jobs it’s going to turn them into skeptics of all vaccines, even the very effective ones.

More harm than good was done there. The government should have approved them for voluntary use so the fallout would not have been so bad.

This is typical of Covid conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorists of any sort: one or two papers on one side prove something, but an overwhelming mountain of evidence on the other side does not prove something. The theorist makes no explanation as to how a planetful of scientists missed the obvious truth that some random dudes found; they just assert that it happened, or make some hand-waving explanation about how an inexplicable planet-wide force of censors is silencing the few unremarkable randos who somehow have the truth.

The first paper seems to claim a very standard cohort study is subject to "immortal time bias", an effect whereby measuring outcomes can seem to change them. The typical example of sampling time bias is that slow-growing cancers are more survivable than fast-growing ones, but also more likely to be measured by a screening, giving a correlation between screening and survivablility. So you get a time effect where more fast-acting cancers do not end up in the measurement, biasing the data.

But in measurements such that one outcome or the other does not bias the odds of that outcome being sampled, there can be no measurement time effect, which is why it's not corrected for in studies like this. The authors do not explain why measurement time effects would have anything to do with detecting or not detecting death rates in the abstract, or anywhere else in the paper, because they are quacks, who apply arbitrary math to get the outcome they want.

As another commenter pointed out, randomized controlled trials -- which cannot possibly have this made-up time effect -- often clearly show a strongly positive effect for vaccination.

I did not read the second paper.

Please stop posting conspiracy theory garbage.

A sibling read the your first link and noted the problems with it. I read just the abstract of the second link, and it's clear their methodology and description of what they're measuring can't actually support their conclusions.

I agree. Again the vast majority would have gotten the vaccine.

There's always going to be people for all kinds of reasons pushing out bad ideas. That's part of the trade-off of living in a free society where there is no universal "right" opinion the public must hold.

> They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects

Most people are not anti-vax. If "they've" "taken over public discourse" in other subjects to the point you are now holding a minority opinion you should consider whether "they" are right or wrong and why so many people believe what they do.

If can't understand their position and disagree you should reach out to people in a non-confrontational way, understand their position, then explain why you disagree (if you still do at that point). If we all do a better job at this we'll converge towards truth. If you think talking and debate isn't the solution to disagreements I'd argue you don't really believe in our democratic system (which isn't a judgement).

If that were the case, wouldn’t we see vaccine skepticism in poorly educated, racist non-Western nations?

> I think the anti-vax thing is mostly because the average Western education level is just abysmal.

What does the West have to do with it? Non-westerners are even more into folk medicine and witch doctors.

Anti-vax has never really been a thing though. I don't know what the data is these days, but it used to be like 1% of the population who were anti-vax.

We have the same thing going on with racism in the West where people are convinced racism is a much bigger problem than it actually is.

And whether it's anti-vax or racist beliefs, when you start attacking people for holding these views you always end up inadvertently encouraging people to start asking why that is and they end up down rabbit holes.

No one believes peas cause cancer for example, but I guarantee one of best ways to make people start to believing peas cause cancer is for the media to start talking about how some people believe that peas do cause cancer, then for sites like YouTube and Facebook to starting ban people who talk about it. Because if they allow people to talk about UFOs and flat Earth conspiracies why are they banning people for suggesting that peas cause cancer? Is there some kind of conspiracy going on funded by big agriculture? You can see how this type of thinking happens.

The anti-vax thing is because every single comparative study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children found a greater rate of developmental disorders in vaccinated children. They're also the only products for which you're not allowed to sue the manufacturers for liability, and the justification given by the manufacturers for requesting this liability protection was literally that they'd be sued out of business otherwise. If they were as safe as other treatments they wouldn't need a blanket liability immunity.

Anthony R. Mawson, et al., “Pilot Comparative Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6 to 12-year-old U.S. Children,” Journal of Translational Science 3, no. 3 (2017): 1-12, doi: 10.15761/JTS.1000186

Anthony R. Mawson et al., “Preterm Birth, Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Cross-Sectional Study of 6- to 12-Year-Old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children,” Journal of Translational Science 3, no. 3 (2017): 1-8, doi:10.15761/JTS.1000187.

Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, “Analysis of Health Outcomes in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children: Developmental Delays, Asthma, Ear Infections and Gastrointestinal Disorders,” SAGE Open Medicine 8, (2020): 2050312120925344, doi:10.1177/2050312120925344.

Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, “Health Effects in Vaccinated versus Unvaccinated Children,” Journal of Translational Science 7, (2021): 1-11, doi:10.15761/JTS.1000459.

James Lyons-Weiler and Paul Thomas, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses along the Axis of Vaccination,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 22 (2020): 8674, doi:10.3390/ijerph17228674.

James Lyons-Weiler, "Revisiting Excess Diagnoses of Illnesses and Conditions in Children Whose Parents Provided Informed Permission to Vaccinate Them" September 2022 International Journal of Vaccine Theory Practice and Research 2(2):603-618 DOI:10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i2.59

NVKP, “Diseases and Vaccines: NVKP Survey Results,” Nederlandse Vereniging Kritisch Prikken, 2006, accessed July 1, 2022.

Joy Garner, “Statistical Evaluation of Health Outcomes in the Unvaccinated: Full Report,” The Control Group: Pilot Survey of Unvaccinated Americans, November 19, 2020.

Joy Garner, “Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated,” International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research 2, no. 2, (2022): 670-686, doi: 10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i2.40.

Rachel Enriquez et al., “The Relationship Between Vaccine Refusal and Self-Report of Atopic Disease in Children,” The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 115, no. 4 (2005): 737-744, doi:10.1016/j.jaci.2004.12.1128.

There's a journey that every hypothesis makes on the route to becoming "information", and that journey doesn't start at top-down official recognition. Ideas have to circulate, get evaluated and rejected and accepted by different groups, and eventually grasp their way towards consensus.

I don't believe Trump's or Kennedy's ideas about COVID and medicine are the ones that deserve to win out, but I do think that top-down suppression of ideas can be very harmful to truth seeking and was harmful during the pandemic. In North America I believe this led to a delayed (and ultimately minimal) social adoption of masks, a late acceptance of the aerosol-spread vector, an over-emphasis on hand washing, and a far-too-late restriction on international travel and mass public events, well past the point when it could have contributed to containing the disease (vs Taiwan's much more effective management, for example).

Of course there's no guarantee that those ideas would have been accepted in time to matter had there been a freer market for views, and of course it would have opened the door to more incorrect ideas as well, but I'm of the view that it would have helped.

More importantly I think those heavy restrictions on pre-consensus ideas (as many of them would later become consensus) helped lead to a broader undermining of trust in institutions, the fallout of which we are observing today.

Look at 4chan and it's derivatives: minimal algorithms and they're the shitholes of ideas on the internet.

Is there any consideration of this with regard to Section 230? e.g., you're a passive conduit if you allow something to go online, but you're an active publisher if you actively employ any form of algorithm to publish and promote?

Community notes is better than nothing, but they only relate to a single tweet. So if one tweet with misinformation gets 100k likes, then a community note might show up correcting it.

But if 100 tweets each get 1000 likes, they're never singularly important enough to community note.

Online, sure. But online doesn't mean YouTube or Facebook.

Right, engagement algorithms are like giving bad takes a rocket ship.

The words of world renown epidemiologists who were, to be frank, boring and unentertaining could never possibly compete with crunchymom44628 yelling about how Chinese food causes covid.

Bad takes have the advantage of the engagement of both the people who vehemently agree and the people who vehemently disagree. Everyone is incentivized to be a shock jock. And the shock jocks are then molded by the algorithm to be ever more shock jockish.

Especially at a time when we were all thrown out of the streets and into our homes and online.

And here I'll end this by suggesting everyone watch Eddington.

>It massively amplified the nuts. It brought it to the mainstream.

>COVID was handled terribly after the first month or so, and hopefully we've learned from that. We're going to endure the negative consequences for years.

In theory, I agree, kind of.

But also - we were 10+ months into COVID raging in the US before Biden’s administration, the administration that enacted the policies the article is about, came to be. Vaccine production and approval were well under way, brought to fruition in part due to the first Trump administration. The “nuts” had long been mainstream and amplified before this “silencing” began. Misinformation was rampant and people were spreading it at a quick speed. Most people I know who ultimately refused the vaccines made up their minds before Biden took office.

What's your alternative? The opposite is state dictated censorship and secrecy and those have turned very wrong every single time.

Well, people literally died. So, I think we all know how it played out.

The same thing since time eternal will continue to occur: the educated and able will physically move themselves from risk and others will suffer either by their own volition, or by association, or by lot.

In California, it is required for public schools and many private schools also require it, so effectively it isn't much of a choice.

Its known strategy that happens all the time by corrupt individuals in governments around the world. Its so pervasive, im not going to even to bother posting links.

Better out in the open with refutations or warnings than in the dark where concepts become physical dangers.

Re: 1- one certain protection of the state that they benefit from is the US Constitution, which as interpreted so far forbids the government to impair their free speech rights. Making a private actor host content they personally disagree with violates their right of free speech! That's what the 1st Amendment is all about

2. This has already been adjudicated and this argument lost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri

3. What market is Youtube a monopoly in?

This seems unlikely to be constitutional in the US.

These people will claim they were 'silenced' regardless. Even as they appear with their published bestseller about being silenced on every podcast and news broadcast under the sun, they will speak of the 'conspiracy' working against them at every step. The actual facts at hand almost never matter. Even at a press conference where the President is speaking on your behalf they'll speak of the 'groups' that are 'against' them, full of nefarious purpose. There is no magical set of actions that changes the incentive they have to lie, or believe lies. (except regulation of snake oil, which is not going to happen any time soon)

>Slow down our algorithmic hell hole.

What are your suggestions on accomplishing this while also bent compatible with the idea that government and big tech should not control ideas and speech?

If the government asks private companies to do that, then that's a violation of 1st amendment, isn't it?

This is the conundrum social media has created. In the past only the press, who were at least semi-responsible, had the ability to spread information on a massive scale. Social media changed that. Now anyone can spread information instantly on a massive scale, and often it is the conspiracy theories and incorrect information that people seek out.

"We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive." -- Bill Gates to Oprah, on "AI and the Future of us".

Easy solution: Repeal Section 230.

Social media platforms in the United States rely heavily on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides them immunity from liability for most user-generated content.

Try to post a meme here, see how long it stays up.

More seriously, it's just not this simple man. I know people really want it to be, but it's not.

I watched my dad get sucked down a rabbit hole of qanon, Alex Jones, anti-vax nonsense and God knows what other conspiracy theories. I showed him point blank evidence that qanon was bullshit, and he just flat out refuses to believe it. He's representative of a not insignificant part of the population. And you can say it doesn't do any damage, but those people vote, and I think we can see clearly it's done serious damage.

When bonkers ass fringe nonsense with no basis in reality gets platformed, and people end up in that echo chamber, it does significant damage to the public discourse. And a lot of it is geared specifically to funnel people in.

In more mainstream media climate change is a perfect example. The overwhelming majority in the scientific community has known for a long time it's an issue. There were disagreement over cause or severity, but not that it was a problem. The media elevated dissenting opinions and gave the impression that it was somehow an even split. That the people who disagree with climate change were as numerous and as well informed, which they most certainly weren't, not by a long shot. And that's done irreparable damage to society.

Obviously these are very fine lines to be walked, but even throughout US history, a country where free speech is probably more valued than anywhere else on the planet, we have accepted certain limitations for the public good.

If I were trying to govern during a generational, world stopping epoch event, I would also not waste time picking through the trash to hear opinions.

I would put my trust in the people I knew were trained for this and adjust from there.

I suspect many of these opinions are born from hindsight.

The "debate" ended up doing nothing but spreading misinformation.

Society as a whole has a responsibility to not do that kind of shit. We shouldn't be encouraging the spread of lies.

> We needed those debates. Because the unchecked “trust the experts” makes the experts dumber. The experts need to respond to challenges.

We've had these debates for decades. The end result is stuff like Florida removing all vaccine mandates. You can't debate a conspiracy or illogical thinking into to going away, you can only debate it into validity.

Really, discussion was limited? Or blatant lies were rightly excluded from discourse?

There's a big difference, and in any healthy public discourse there are severe reputations penalties for lies.

If school reopening couldn't be discussed, could you point to that?

It's very odd how as time goes on my recollection differs so much from others, and I'm not sure if it's because of actual different experiences or because of the fog of memory.

>Who gets to decide what’s the truth vs. lies? The “police”?

This keeps coming up on this site. It seems like a basic premise for a nuanced and compassionate worldview. Humility is required. Even if we assume the best intentions, the fallible nature of man places limits on what we can do.

Yet we keep seeing posters appealing to Scientism and "objective truth". I'm not sure it is possible to have a reasonable discussion where basic premises diverge. It is clear how these themes have been used in history to support some of the worst atrocities.

I think it was even slightly worse. The White House was effectively delegating the decision of who to ban/police to the NIH/NIAID, an organization that was funding novel coronavirus research in Wuhan.

It's easy to see how at minimum there could be a conflict of interest.

They claim that the Biden admin pressured them to do it, except that they had been voluntarily doing it even during Trump's initial presidency.

The current administration has been openly threatening companies over anything and everything they don't like, it isn't surprising all of the tech companies are claiming they actually support the first amendment and were forced by one of the current administration's favorite scapegoats to censor things.

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There is no mass Marxist movement in the USA. There is a left wing crippled by worse than useless identity politics.

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What do you think about measures that stop short of banning? Like down ranking, demonetizing, or even hell 'banning' that just isolates cohorts that consistently violate rules?

No. You are objectively wrong. It's great medicine that works -- for example, in Germany, and in the US, and elsewhere, it has stemmed the flow of violent extremism historically to stop the KKK and the Nazis. You can't even become a citizen if you have been a Nazi. Even on the small scale, like reddit, banning /r/fatpeoplehate was originally subject to much handwringing and weeping by the so-called free speech absolutists, but guess what -- it all went away, and the edgelords and bullies went back to 4chan to sulk, resulting in the bullshit not being normalized and made part of polite society.

If you want to live in a society where absolutely anything goes at all times, then could I recommend Somalia?

The Nazis in 1933 hadn't done anything within an order of magnitude of the evil they would perpetrate in 1943. They nevertheless were still Nazis, and everyone who did not actively condemn them then was in part responsible for what they did later.

Many evil people weren't Nazis; some Nazis weren't necessarily evil. Evil is not part of the definition of Nazism. Promoting authoritarianism, exclusionary nationalism, institutional racism, autarky, anti-liberalism and anti-socialism are the hallmarks of Nazism. Anyone who holds the beliefs of the Nazis is a Nazi, regardless of what level of success they have to date achieved in carrying out their aims.

We read the history, a lot of it rhymes. Conservatives failed, and exchanged their values for a populist outsider to maintain power (see Franz von Papen). The outsider demeans immigrants and 'sexual deviants'. The outsider champions nationalism. He pardons the people who broke the law to support him. Condemns violence against the party while ignoring the more common violence coming out of the those aligned with the party. Encourages the language of enemies when discussing political opponents and protestors.

Nazi has a lot more connotations than genocide. I'm not sure it is worth nitpicking over. Even if you tone it down to Fascist or Authoritarian there will be push back.

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Europe is sliding, but has done ok so far. Crossing fingers.

Well it would if we would actually ban Nazis instead of platform them. They haven't been banned. That's the problem.

Perhaps not the wisest comment to make in light of recent events

The New York Times has published plenty of stories you could call controversial. Just this morning the top headline was that Trump lied at the UN. Trump has sued the Times for defamation, yet the paper stands by its reporting. That’s how publishing works: if you can’t defend what you publish, don’t publish it. The Section 230 debate is about whether large online platforms such as Facebook should bear similar accountability for the content they distribute. I think they should. That's the only way we can control misinformation and disinformation.

> With medicine there's pushback because the vast majority of the time, someone's scamming you and you likely don't actually know what you're talking about, we had a ton of this during covid, radioactive jewelery that was supposed to protect you, cow piss (I personally know people who tried this...), 5G towers (actual damage done to all sorts of towers), Ivermectin, Hydrochloroquine and more. People who are sick or have a sick loved one are especially vulnerable to these sorts of things (there's an example of such a victim in the comments), and often end up making things worse by waiting too long or causing further damage.

Pushback on what? There's always been new age hippy garbage, Chinese medicine, curing cancer with berries, and that kind of thing around. I don't see that causing much damage and certainly not enough to warrant censorship. People can easily see through it and in the end they believe what they want to believe.

Far far more dangerous and the cause of real damage that I have seen come from the pharmaceutical industry and their captured regulators. Bribing medical professionals, unconscionable public advertising practices, conspiring to push opioids on the population, lying about the cost to produce medications, and on and on. There's like, a massive list of the disasters these greedy corporations and their spineless co-conspirators in government regulators have caused.

Good thing we can question them, their motives, their products.

> With questioning elections, I think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication of why it wasn't appropriate?

I don't understand your question. Can you explain why you think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication that discussion and disagreement about elections should be censored?

> This wasn't how questioning the results of elections goes in democracies. Instead, even after courts had investigated, the outgoing president refused to accept the result without any substantiated evidence.

I never quite followed exactly were the legal issues around that election. Trump was alleged to have tried to illegally influence some election process and/or obstructed legal transfer of power. Additionally there was a riot of people who thought Trump won and some broke into congress and tried to intimidate law makers.

I mean taking the worst possible scenario, Trump knew he lost and was scheming a plan to seize power and was secretly transmitting instructions to this mob to enter the building and take lawmakers hostage or something like that. Or any other scenario you like, let your imagination go wild.

I still fail to see how that could possibly justify censorship of the people and prohibiting them from questioning the government or its democratic processes. In fact the opposite, a government official went rogue and committed a bunch of crimes so therefore... the people should not be permitted to question or discuss the government and its actions?

There are presumably laws against those actions of rioting, insurrection, etc. Why, if the guilty could be prosecuted with those crimes, should the innocent pay with the destruction of their human rights, in a way that wouldn't even solve the problem and could easily enable worse atrocities be committed by the government in future?

Should people who question the 2024 election be censored? Should people who have concerns with the messages from the government's foremost immigration and deportation "experts" be prohibited from discussing their views or protesting the government's actions?