Facebook is international. Do they allow all speech even that which could be viewed as propaganda in the US?
Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian disinformation or COVID-19?
We have tried many different moderation models and not all of them work.
If we try the Reddit route, then we could have incredible bias in moderated communities.
What about fitting the StackOverflow model to social media?
Another route is how X provides for the Community Notes feature. Would that have worked? Is Community Notes still susceptible to the same bias?
How many additional people died because the mitigations we put into place were targeted at a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) but not effective against a virus with an airborne spread (like the measles)?
Knowledgeable academics who argued that the costs of lockdowns in schools would far outweigh any possible benefit were suppressed by non-scientists.
All talk of vaccine side effects was labelled misinformation and suppressed, even when accompanied with legitimate and accepted studies.
Etc.
The only common thread between all the possible examples of censorship - from side effects to lockdown effectiveness to the lab-leak theory to the US role in funding GOF research at the WIV - seemed to be that unless you spoke the narrative of the day then you were dangerous to society. Fully unpacking the irony there would take a book.
Many books have been written about this kind of censorship, because suppressing conversation like this never leads anywhere good. It's an enduring and central theme of damn-near all the top dystopian fiction.
The pandemic and the compliance and the us vs. them mentality really opened by eyes. It’s how terrible things happen, people will just do what their told by some perceived authority no matter what.