alt Hacker NewsCensoring an interview with a political opponent is a far cry from spreading disinformation that is counter to broadly accepted medical advice during a pandemic with the intent of harming the general population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Replies
Unfortunately, reasonable views from experts like Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Jay Bhattacharya Professor of Medicine at Stanford were also suppressed. Kulldorff only responded to a question saying: "COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children." Which is correct, mainstream epidemiology and was the government guidance in the most countries at the time.
https://undark.org/2024/01/08/covid-misinformation-censorshi...
How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate
Sure, but that's the straw-man version of the argument. During COVID, there was aggressive censorship of _everything_ related to the virus that didn't exactly toe the party line. Satire, comedy, and truly live questions (like the weak version of the lab leak hypothesis, that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from a lab into human population) were censored alongside the obviously false, harmful, and misleading takes about drinking bleach and Ivermectin.
Both science and democracy require active conversation that permits dissenting viewpoints and challenges to the accepted wisdom. Once we have an organization deciding what "the truth" is, we're doomed to stagnation and extremely vulnerable to organizational capture by self-motivated people.
In other words, once you build the political, legal, and technical machinery of censorship, you're half way to having it co-opted by people with anti-social intents.