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The opinion that someone isn't worth listening to and choosing not to amplify their words is an opinion like any other.

The whole cancel culture thing stems from people who believe that they don't just have freedom of speech, but rather the right to force others to listen.

If a community dislikes what you say and chooses to make that content less visible in response, that's perfectly reasonable. You are not being censored, you are being rejected.

Downvoting is an expression of opinion. Opinions aren't owed platforms and never have been. Are all magazines anti-free speech because they don't publish everyone?

And besides, "well-researched" is highly subjective in the best of cases, and in ones like this is usually not accurate in any sense.

For better or worse, the up/downvote buttons are used to express an opinion -- that is the primary purpose.

The problem is that any crowdsourced curation feature uses significant downvotes as a signal for spam or content which otherwise violates the site policies.