Sunlight is more effective than censorship

In the spirit of this article, which "fake news" is being decried here? Because there's definitely two kinds of "fake news". There's the factual bad news that people in power sometimes call "fake news", apparently because there's a small chance that the public will believe them and ignore the factual bad news. Then, there's the "fake news" that's actually false, and getting pushed by entities like botnets, shadowy foreign actors, etc, apparently in the hopes of overwhelming any factual news about the topic in question.

Without making that distinction, and saying which "fake news" they hope to combat, this article is rubbish.

This article itself might be an example of the actually false kind of "fake news". It starts off with a subhead of "Blockchain removed the need to trust authorities with our money. Now it can remove the need to trust them with the truth". This immediately confuses "money" with "cryptocurrency". The subhead also implies some kind of absolute truth or trustworthiness of "blockchain", which as I accessed the article, was belied by an "editor's choice" headline of "Savvy memecoin trader makes $988K in 3 hours despite rug pull". The entire cryptocurrency movement is so plagued with theft and scams that they had to invest an old phrase, "rug pull" with a new meaning because the cryptocurrency movement has enabled new types of theft.

Is it?

I hear people say that. I know the downsides of censorship. But I haven't seen that sunlight is any more effective.

An awful lot of people believe an awful lot of easily-disproven bullshit. Frequently, exposing somebody's false beliefs to "sunshine" just makes them believe it harder.

"Sunshine is the best disinfectant" often means "I have some falsehood that I wish to keep pushing, and I'm going to pretend that I will change my mind if it's wrong".

All other things being equal, I'd rather not censor things. But all things aren't always equal, and I don't think that an absolutist approach actually helps anything.