[egypturnash]

I have come to the point of view that what radical free speech people deride as "censorship" is often better described as "an immune system".

When you catch a cold, it is because viruses have used a bunch of subtle hacks to convince some of your cells to stop being part of you and start making more viruses instead. Your immune system comes in and stops them from doing this. Sometimes it makes mistakes, sometimes it can be co-opted and used as a viral host itself (see HIV for instance), but on the whole it keeps your cells busy being a part of you rather than striking out on their own agenda, whether it's one they arrived at by random mutations like most cancers, or one that crawled in under their normal defenses like a virus.

Running a platform that gives a voice to anyone and everyone, up to the limits of "whatever gets the platform-runner hauled into court and fined for more money than they make off of spreading the view that got them in trouble", is like actively providing places for diseases to grow.

[luckylion]

To keep the analogy: if you live in a quarantined clean room to protect your immune system from the bad germs, viruses etc, you're going to end up with a very weak immune system. If you expose your immune system to the world, it's going to learn how to fight specific threats it'll encounter.

[saalweachter]

And yet for the really virulent stuff -- the polio, the smallpox, the measles -- we don't rely on random exposure, we innoculate with dead and fragmented pieces of the virus while working to exterminate it in the wild.

[luckylion]

That would be the illegal stuff, I think. We're dealing with that on a societal basis. I suppose the extent depends on the trust we place into the ability of citizens to not collectively fall for something just by being exposed. If we all had very frail immune systems, doing our very best to extinguish the common cold would make sense. Since we don't, let's keep those reasonably safe that are in danger and let the rest deal with it.

For anything else, it may quickly become problematic if those that get scared or upset the most over news stories are in charge of declaring when to quarantine people, neighborhoods or states.