alt Hacker NewsSure, 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.
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> once you build the political, legal, and technical machinery of censorship, you're half way to having it co-opted
Indeed, my original post ("Both political parties have tried to silence dissenting views") was simply about censorship being bad no matter which political party does it. I hate that the current administration is doing it. I hated it when the prior administration did it. If we can't acknowledge that both parties did it, then when the parties switch again, there will still be secret soft censorship happening. It's a moral hazard to reflexively discount when a side I may agree with does something wrong.
It's getting increasingly harder to point out when both parties are wrong without people assuming it's a back-handed defense of the other party.
> During COVID, there was aggressive censorship of _everything_ related to the virus that didn't exactly toe the party line.
Not by the government. This was by companies that wanted their customers not to die, so they could make money.
Weird, cause I remember there being a very lengthy and involved debate about COVID. I remember hearing a ton of dissent and disagreement with the government positions... almost like... they weren't being censored. There are hundreds of thousands of discussions about the lab leak hypothesis, and there were hundreds of those discussions at the time. There was also plenty of conflicting advice given, including "injecting bleach" which was advice given by the then president, and ivermectin, which was advice given by 100s of online podcasters.
Even today, you can find like, hundreds of articles of dissenting opinions that were posted at the time of covid. In fact, no one quite yelled "I'm being silenced" as loudly as covid deniers who were demanding to share untested hypotheses.
What I can't find, is any articles that were pulled-from-the-air for going against the then-administration's opinions. But if you have them, please share. Importantly, they need to not be pulled for "false, harmful, or misleading takes."