YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke
I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it&#x27;s okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they&#x27;re not bound by the first amendment (I don&#x27;t claim to understand the nuances of the &quot;platform&quot; laws so I won&#x27;t address that), but that&#x27;s different from saying that we as a society should <i>want</i> our private platforms to engage in such censorship and suppression.<p>Booting people off of platforms merely reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, and further radicalizes them.<p>COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of &quot;disinformation&quot;. The argument is seductively simple: &quot;being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence&#x2F;negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content&quot;.<p>Many may disagree, but I think we need to throw out this concept of &quot;disinformation&quot; entirely. I don&#x27;t believe in fighting &quot;bad ideas&quot; by suppressing them, I believe in shining a light on them. Let the truth fight for itself. (And of course now comes the classic counter-argument: that the evils of disinformation possess a virality that makes them spread far more easily than the truth, being that truth is nuanced and difficult to acquire whereas bad information is seductively simple. I won&#x27;t address that argument here but personally I think it&#x27;s a very dangerous way of thinking)