> It seems that the big factor is power. When you're in power, you use any excuse to silence the people who disagree. When you're not in power, you recognize th

> It seems that the big factor is power. When you're in power, you use any excuse to silence the people who disagree. When you're not in power, you recognize that free speech is a universal principle. This is an oversimplification to the point of not agreeing with reality in any useful way. Just a few months ago the party in power was “for free speech” while the party out of power was arguing for “limiting the reach” of certain content. It might me more true to say that each party wants there to be more speech that it agrees with (i.e. speech that preserves or gives it more power) and less speech that it doesn’t like. There are more strategies than plain old censorship; as we saw recently drowning out the discourse with falsehoods works just as well. Few people care about some abstract ideal of “free speech”.