I really wish these companies would be consistent about their policies. It feels like they pick and choose when to enforce them, often times seemingly in line with their employees’ or leaders’ biases. For example what constitutes a ‘hacked’ item? The JD Vance dossier? Biden’s daughter’s journal? Trump’s tax returns? Hunter Biden’s laptop? Diplomatic cables from Wikileaks? Why are some of these given a pass and others censored? I don’t care for the completely subjective claim of “newsworthiness”, which is clearly a shameless excuse for biased application of policies.

Stepping back - the degree to which suppression of information has been normalized is disturbing. We’re seeing this all over the world today. Brazil with secret censorship of social media content and users. The EU with DSA. Australia with the recently proposed misinformation bill and fines for social media companies. Canada with various censorship measures. The US with government agencies aggressively pressuring private companies to perform censorship on their behalf. And of course private companies acting in near perfect coordination to shut down information sources. The most recent example of that is probably the ban of RT (Russian state controlled media).

Individuals should be allowed to communicate freely, access information freely, and decide for themselves what to make of that information. They should be able to decide what is factual. They don’t need protection, and the claims that they should be censored for their won good is at worst dystopian and at best a way to keep people from seeing information that undermines those in power. We need a massive revival of free speech values, globally.