The public square, and the communication around it are controlled by BigTech, BigMedia, and are heavily beholden to Govt & BigPharma which means pushing provax, esg, and various other uniparty narratives. That means publications, and new sources, as well as social media, forums, instant messaging, IMs, email and many others are all censored. It is hard to reach eyeballs if all communications are controlled&censored too.
The fact is, it’s still vastly easier today to disseminate your ideas — no matter what they are — than at any other time in history. Do you really think radio, newspapers, tv stations, and book publishers weren’t just as influenced by large corporate and political interests?
It is simply the ones that are popular that have and will enforce their own terms of service.
And that is because there is a proven, strong relationship between sites that do this and sites that are popular. Because again. Most people simply aren't interested in hearing the type of views that are typically censored.
On a high karma Reddit account I was warned by an admin about banning for a specific story they wanted suppressed, and the post was deleted.
On Facebook I have been blocked from sending specific links from 3 different URLs in IMs, the last of which was because it had a contrary position about the Ukrainian war (the website Southfront which is Russian govt affiliated) when I was talking with a friend of mine that happens to have a Ukrainian wife. We were talking about stories in the news in the West vs East and what was the actual story.
But it's completely absurd. Was there a degree of platform moderation to attempt to reduce covid disinformation, or at least label it as such? Yes. But was there anything remotely resembling effective "censorship" that made it at all difficult to reach "eyeballs" with bogus antivaxxer narratives? No. Of course not. The claim is ludicrous on its face. We were all bombarded with BOTH sides throughout the pandemic.