[aftbit]

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.

[xracy]

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."

[aftbit]

Certainly at the beginning, the tools weren't 100% in place, at least in the west. Famously, China silenced one of the very first COVID reporters and forced him to recant, before he himself died from the virus.[1]

As the pandemic wore on, we began to see a fight over "fact-checking". Mostly, it played out on Facebook and YouTube, not in traditional media. At the height, I saw a lot of channels self-censoring by avoiding any mention of the words "COVID", "virus", "coronavirus" etc to avoid the AI bot that would capriciously ban or demonetize their videos because it clocked them as COVID misinformation, even when they weren't primarily talking about the virus or proposing any sort of false, harmful, or misleading takes. Many channels do similar today, saying "PDF files" instead of pedophiles or "SA" / "Sea Ess Eh Em" instead of "sexual assault" or "kiddy porn" while talking about the Epstein files. Or everyone's favorite, "unalive" or "self-delete" instead of "dead"/"kill" or "suicide".

I don't have a good source for most of that handy - I just remember living through it. I'm sorry, I know anecdotes aren't data!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

[xracy]

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I also lived through it, and you and I remember it differently. Which is why I asked for clear examples, because it's easy to go back and forth about anecdotes.

[mrandish]

> 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.

[lern_too_spel]

> 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.

[mrandish]

Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook to 'censor' some COVID-19 content during the pandemic: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...

> "The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic... Take, for example, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kulldorff often tweeted views at odds with U.S. public health authorities ... Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one that happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines."

How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate

[lern_too_spel]

"Pressured." They merely suggested that it was better for the country and for business, and most of the companies agreed. There were no threats of fines or lawsuits, and none were levied.

[Schmerika]

> There were no threats of fines or lawsuits

Weren't there huge monopoly cases being furthered against Meta, Twitter and TikTok at that time? And more action against other major tech companies

If I'm threatening you over your 'possible' monopoly with one hand, and 'politely' asking you to censor millions of stories with the other - are those things completely unrelated? Or is there possible an implied message there?

A mafioso will never tell you straight-up that they're threatening and extorting you. But if you look between the lines even a little bit you can discern the message.

(Sometimes the person delivering that message isn't even aware of the threat they're sending; afaik it's entirely possible that Lina Khan was completely genuine with her push.)

> and none were levied.

Well everyone did what they were 'politely asked', didn't they. Meta alone removed or suppressed well over a hundred million posts.

[lern_too_spel]

> Or is there possible an implied message there?

None of these antitrust cases were dropped for doing what was in their mutual interest. You're grasping at straws.

> Well everyone did what they were 'politely asked

Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.

[Schmerika]

> None of these antitrust cases were dropped for doing what was in their mutual interest.

I'm not understanding either what you're claiming or why you believe it. Keep in mind that I don't believe in always taking what the government says at face value.

> You're grasping at straws.

Why would I be desperate? I've no skin in this game, beyond a general wish not to have legitimate and important speech suppressed and censored.

> Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.

They didn't do everything, they say (did they ever say what they refused to do?), but they did a lot. As did Twitter. We know this for a fact.

[aftbit]

This is exactly how the current CBS censorship works. The FCC said they "may" revise a rule, so CBS complied in advance by removing the political speech that the admin wanted to avoid.

[lern_too_spel]

There was no threat of revising a rule that would result in punishment of the companies. It is exactly not how the current CBS censorship works.