See, this is exactly the attitude which is why censorship will fail. If you want democracy to survive, you need to ask and answer the question: why did Trump's

See, this is exactly the attitude which is why censorship will fail. If you want democracy to survive, you need to ask and answer the question: why did Trump's lying work? It's not like he was the first and only person to say something absurd on twitter, but why did his message get tens of millions of people, many of whom you would otherwise consider to be open minded and rational, to vote for him not once but twice? And now that Trump has been forced off twitter you hear about much fewer controversies involving him, yet do you seriously think the issues that led to the problem in the first place have magically gone away? No the Trump supporters are still out there, discussing wild conspiracy theories, you're just less informed about it. Censorship is like a pain killer - it hides the issue, and maybe makes the issue more bearable for a short period of time, but it doesn't treat the underlying condition. It's not social media which democracy is incompatible with, but complacency. And this is the case for most social issues. You'd recieve extremely strong pushback trying to ban smoking or drinking except under extremely specific circumstances. And even then, kids smoking or people driving drunk suggest much deeper issues like unmanaged peer pressure issues at school or the absence of a viable method of transportation besides driving. Yes it's easier to sweep such issues under the rug and ignore them than to do the hard work and fix them, but that's not how you build and maintain a functioning society. And further, a child's right to smoke or a person's right to drive drunk is astronomically less sacred to democracy than the right to free speech. Getting back to censorship, I feel like you mischaracterized what I was saying. Posting "you should read this links" is not combatting misinformation. Changing school curriculums to focus on critical thinking, holding news publications accountable when they fall short of their editorial standards, and trying to understand where our ideological opponents are coming from so we can have constructive dialogue is what I'm referring to. You don't fix things by asking other people to change, we must make deep changes to our own behavior to secure our democracy. It's hard, it's unfair, it's distasteful, but there is no substitute. Deep down, you and everyone else knows this. Censorship is nothing more than a delightful fantasy of an easy way out, which we all know would lead to disastrous consequences if we actually attempted it.