But yet that's what's happening. Trained virologists are getting strikes for daring to talk about things that aren't strict CDC narrative.
I think banning things like say ISIS recruitment and things that are dead pan, unarguably and immediately dangerous is tolerable censorship. Outside of that, it seems like a political tool.
Right but I'm reading it like you don't seem to have a concern about accountability and how wrong these organizations are currently getting it. At what point do they get it so wrong so often, it's better for society that they stop trying. At what point does getting it so wrong so often turn from "curating misinformation" turn into "silencing political opposition."
I know this is over the top, but if 20% of death penalty cases were, "oops we got it wrong," it's time for them to stop trying to implement the death penalty.
The death penalty has the convenience of having very good other options and generally resources dedicated to a few events. Personally I see no reason for the death penalty considering the alternatives.
Nobody is actually targeting misinformation. (How much are flat-earthers censored?) What they're actually targeting is speech we don't like. We might say "harmful" instead of "don't like", but I'm not sure how sharply that division can be drawn; if you don't like certain speech, you can find reasons to claim it is harmful.
And you could argue that the lab leak hypothesis was harmful. It was leading people to mistrust scientific experts at a time when they really needed to listen to experts, when not listening to experts was causing definite harm, including a lot of death. The lab leak hypothesis was also almost certainly false... until it wasn't, until it became at least reasonably plausible.
So I was all ready to say that it's just speech we don't like, and censoring speech because we don't like it is not an acceptable thing to do... and then you mentioned ISIS recruitment videos. That is speech I don't like. It's speech that is harmful. It's speech that probably contains a number of statements that are provably false.
So I'd really like to draw the line where the lab leak hypothesis is OK (even when almost everyone thought it was false), and ISIS recruitment videos are clearly censorable. But at the moment, I don't see how to do it, other than my intuition of what's OK and what's not. And my intuition doesn't work when someone other than me is doing the actual deciding.
Can anyone state a clear standard here? (The more objective, the better.)