But if 100 tweets each get 1000 likes, they're never singularly important enough to community note.
In person, things are different. The dominant side can and often enough does drown out dissent. In that case, the intent is to silence. So that would be "censorship" in a cultural, not legal sense which would be hostile to the freedom of speech in the cultural sense, not legal.
People should be free to say what they want online. But going down "YouTube conspiracy theory" rabbit holes is a real thing, and YouTube doesn't need to make that any easier, or recommend extreme (or demonstrably false) content because it leads to more "engagement".
The first amendment was written in the 1700s...
In this sense platforms like X need to be regulated more like gambling. In some ways X is a big roulette wheel that's being spun which will help stochastically determine where the next major school shooting will take place.
The words of world renown epidemiologists who were, to be frank, boring and unentertaining could never possibly compete with crunchymom44628 yelling about how Chinese food causes covid.
Bad takes have the advantage of the engagement of both the people who vehemently agree and the people who vehemently disagree. Everyone is incentivized to be a shock jock. And the shock jocks are then molded by the algorithm to be ever more shock jockish.
Especially at a time when we were all thrown out of the streets and into our homes and online.
And here I'll end this by suggesting everyone watch Eddington.
One of the sentiments I've been flirted with in posts below/above is the idea that while bad takes and their amplification are indeed a kind of societal evil-- in a society which was more effectively mediated bad takes might serve a vital purpose in the discourse. Societies committed to their own felicity might treat disagreements as an opportunity to extend the public discourse. This seems to be the crux of the thing-- we can take all day about checks and balances but unless a society is truly at some level committed to its own preservation and expansion those checks and balances will end up becoming tools for domination and exploitation as we see in the United States.
It don't care how well you can bake you can't make apple pie with rotten apples. No amount of sugar will correct the rot. Th trick is growing healthy apples.