But there is space between outright censorship and deliberately building a system that promotes the ideas of those who are the best at information warfare.
If you repeat your idea often and loud enough, you can make a large number of people believe anything.
Internet curated by algorithms is a perfect tool for spreading misinformation:
- You need not to carry the weight of any of the legal structures or responsibilities of a journalist.
- You can produce misinformation faster than the news cycle is able to react, meaning your misinformation will be able to poison the well before any conversation is able to take place.
- You can segment your audience so that dissenting opinion is nowhere to be seen.
- By the time any debunking by actual journalists can be done, your target audience is already exposed to the next cycle and can barely remember anything about the previous one.
This is extremely dangerous.
I am sure that the people who came up with automobiles weren't trying to create a vehicle of death, but there needs to be some kind of safety check akin to seat belts for the information propagation that takes place online. I am not sure what the answer is, but acknowledging the problem and trying to do something shouldn't be dismissed with a mere cry of "censorship" when information can and is being weaponized in a way and at a scale that has been impossible so far.