Hard to tell without a free press
I guess our situation with getting news from Facebook is voluntary censorship. Maybe that’s better than forced censorship?
What if the controller of news is benevolent?
I think the situation is that the Chinese government is mostly benevolent to its own citizens, which is why it has fairly good political support domestically. They are however not benevolent to the US interests, which is why we want to stop them. One benefit of a free press is that we’d be able to introduce our own propaganda into the country to push agendas that benefit ourselves.