In the medieval ages, book production and reading were rare and highly controlled capabilities unavailable and unpractical to learn to most. Then Gutenberg and his movable type printing press came around, and suddenly affordable media production and with it, reading. People quickly learned that not only you could print books, but also (political) leaflets, and before long, you had all kinds of these early propaganda instruments floating around, some more outrageous or potentially dangerous than others, from commentary about the local counts's promiscuity to divergent religious or reports on UFO sightings[1]. This of course did not suit the powers to be, and they introduced strict controls on what could and could not printed, they set up censorship offices and heavily taxed or banned private, unlicensed movable type presses. We can only dream about what information, which plays, which artifact we lost because they never were created - and we can be thankful that censorship never works 100%, and some still was printed in secret. It took us 300-400 years and several bloody revolutions to get rid of these governmental controls - and it is a process that has not been completely finished in many parts of the western world.
Then, much later, the Internet came around, the Web being intended as a document store/sharing system for scientific information ("books"). Access to the net was rare and most people did not see the point in getting it ("reading"). But eventually, the system became more ubiquitous and with more non-scientific info around, people started to flock in ("more readers"). Simultaneously, publishing on the net became more approachable, and this made all kind of low-level information available, which sometimes was outrageous, sometimes outright dangerous ("leaflets"). And in the last five years or so, we have seen an increasing push to supress unwanted information (under the guise of "battling fake news") and opinion ("censor's offices"). And just like back then, we will see that censorship does not work perfectly - but how much information will be lost, how much this will hold back society.
This BMJ thing is a symptom of a beginning of things, things will become a lot worse before they become better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over...