[cmh89]

You aren't OP but that's my poin. OP made the absolutist statement that:

"Censorship has always been on the wrong side of history and it still is."

which is obviously absurd because there are very obvious situations where censorship is clearly a good idea, like in banning not just the creation of child pornography but the possession.

When the feds strengthen laws against child porn in the 70s and 80s, that same free speech argument played out. Free speech advocates argued that having recorded evidence of a crime shouldn't be a crime in of itself. You can have pictures of murder victims after all, and there are plenty of recordings of illegal activity on the internet that are totally legal.

Obviously the right side won and the feds passed laws censoring child pornography because the ends, punishing child porn consumers and creators, outweighed the cost, which was a small reduction in freedom of speech.

Every society needs some limits on speech and free speech absolutism is just ideological weakness in thinking about how a society should actually work because in the real world, unlimited speech leads to a lot of people getting hurt.