This is a great illustration of the point I'm making. Thank you for providing a crystal clear example of how we got here.
>This argument might be more appealing if we hadn't just come through a pandemic that an unnamed group of people were more than happy to describe as a hoax.
Yes. If you give people a platform they'll say all kinds of things, true, untrue, and, partly true.
Regarding COVID, what's interesting is social media companies decided that anything that goes against WHO guidelines is a hoax, even if you have credible epidemiologists having a discussion. WHO is staffed by very good people who are experts in their fields, but WHO is a human organization that is susceptible to political influence and regular human faults. For example, I don't fully trust any conclusion the WHO reaches when it comes to COVID and China. I just don't. I'm glad WHO exists and they do a lot of good work, but I don't want WHO dictating (directly or by proxy) which opinions I am allowed to hear.
The implicit argument you're also making is that if you just ban your political opponents promulgating views you think are false (and some many be false), those views will go away. That's not going to happen. All you did was increase mistrust and increase conspiracy thinking.
>There's the myth of election theft if you needed a second example.
By who exactly? Because up until this election, EVERY election that Democrats lost was because of election theft, through either Russian misinformation, or voter suppression, or gerrymandering, or voter id, or systemic racism or unicorns. EVERY.SINGLE.ONE. Trump's election was deemed as stolen by huge swaths of Democratic politicians (including Hillary) and voters.
Oh but those are credible 'election theft' allegations because they come from YOUR political side. It's the other side that gets everything wrong. Your allegations against 'election theft' shouldn't be suppressed, but theirs should. Right?
>There really is a lot of 'misinformation' (outright lying) on social media.
And you're afraid that your reasoning abilities are so feeble that you don't trust yourself to see this misinformation lest you be affected by it? And therefore you need a low-paid, 20-something, intern-censor to tell you what you should and shouldn't see.... You may be OK with that, but I'm not.