TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues

If by "tools" you mean technology or physical infrastructure, I largely agree.

But I'm talking about political tools. Breaking down the norms about how power is supposed to be wielded. Concentrating more and more power in the executive because Congress would rather be powerless and blameless than have responsibility.

For example, giving the President the power to set tariffs was done with the understanding that the President would use this power wisely in an actual national emergency. That created a political tool. Now we have a deeply unwise President who declared a nonsense national emergency and is playing havoc with trade using this tool. If the tool hadn't been created then I don't think we'd have that problem. I doubt Congress would be willing to pass sweeping emergency powers in an environment where there is no emergency and no need for those powers. And there was never a need for those powers. Tariffs don't need to be enacted so rapidly that they can't wait for Congress to convene and pass a law.

In this case, we've created a political tool giving the President broad power to interfere in a specific private business. It's no surprise if that tool gets abused, and it was completely unnecessary to begin with.

So I'd phrase it as: "Good guys shouldn't make political tools that are far more powerful than they need to be assuming that they'll be used wisely, because bad guys will happily use the full power of those tools."

So censoring falsehoods is good, and censoring truth is bad, and you're the one who decides which is which, and you like such censorship working your way. And when censorship you'd just liked so much starts to be used against you, you start to whine. Millenia old story of a deal with devil.

And by the way the covid "fact checking" wasn't based on "truth", it was at political request of White House as Zuck later said, and he did later called the FB fact checking a censorship when disbanding it.

>I have to specify because supposedly intelligent people really think that way

It is the right way to think (with caveats).

Basically, no matter which way you put it, people need some form of government (or more abstractly a state that has authority over people with those people having reduced set of freedoms compared to anarchy). Human nature doesn't bode well with long term planning. For example, with unrestricted capitalism, you have a price on human labor hours that doesn't account for the value of human life - i.e as long as someone can do the job, it doesn't matter what their health is at the end of the job as long as they are replaceable, as this is the most optimal in terms of labor spending. So you need people to collectively form an entity with power of enforcement that is agreed upon by everyone, so that the entity can step in and take action.

Therefore, the goal shouldn't be to restrict the entities power. Doing so is essentially very selfish, which is on par with any libertarian/conservative mindset - as history shows, everyone on the right wing who was crying about censorship on social media for social/political issues has no problem when their side censors it, and broadly oversteps in their alloted power, ignoring the law.

The goal should be to determine whether or not the restricted access makes sense given the current status of the country, and the most importantly, ensuring that the state follows the code of law before anything else. I.e on a very broad sense, instead of arguing who is right and who is wrong, argue what is the metric by which you can get the answer, and then codify it as law.

In a lot of cases, censorship makes sense. And as with any rule, there is going to be some cases where its applied and the outcome is worse than if it wasn't applied. That should be acceptable. In the end, friction in the process still means that things are moving forward, but it also prevents much worse effects if things start moving backwards. Removing that friction means you can go backwards very quickly, like US has done.

> No? The point is that the US government made this deal with Tiktok so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like.

That's too black and white. The Tiktok sale isn't just one thing by one actor for one reason, it's more complicated. There's the Biden administration bill, there's Trump's deal implementing it, etc. I don't think the bill that forced the sale was passed "so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like." Before Trump got involved, it was heading for a straight blackout (which IMHO would have been better for everyone).

Nah, the writing is on the wall for a long time and they nearly got shut down several times. I can’t imagine that the permission to continue operations came without major concessions.