The Dangers of Censorship
Censorship, whether conducted by governments or private entities, is a very dangerous road for free societies to take. I've talked about this issue before, but things may be changing for the better in some ways. First let's talk about where we are today. Traditional media companies and networks such as ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and later CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. who dominated mass media for decades have been supplanted over the past 10 or 15 years to a large degree by tech companies and their platforms. Old media is still around, but to get their messaging out, they rely more heavily than ever on social media and tech platforms for distribution of their content, such as Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and back-end providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Apple. In the last few years, especially as the world has grappled with COVID-19, messaging on those platforms has been increasingly restricted and censored to promote a particular narr