Name one time in history your question is relevant. Until recently, bans were either by law and effectively total, or the 'speech' in question is quite limited

Name one time in history your question is relevant. Until recently, bans were either by law and effectively total, or the 'speech' in question is quite limited in reach. When was there ever a social network-like thing in the past? But, I'll play your game. "Any newspaper in history". They all have or had a policy that they'd only post those letters sent in that were interesting, and would never post outright lies or inflammatory stuff just to get a kick out of things, unless they posted it with a boatload of editorializing around it. Or they WOULD post such things, but only because they were actively attempting to espouse that logic (fox news is certainly not the first channel that is fairly nakedly attempting to steer the conversation towards an entire party's worth of political viewpoints - that's been something newspapers have been doing for a long time, read some editorials of 1900s newspapers for a few laughs). You really think a newspaper that adopted a system where they'd post every letter verbatim regardless of content (as long as the content wasn't illegal on its own) or some sort of lottery system where they'd post randomly selected content, regardless of what it was? - that such a newspaper would have flourished, or that a society that likes that kind of newspaper would have? That's.. crazy talk. I can hear you say; Nah, that does not apply - not what I'm talking about. Okay. So, then - what? Name me _anything_ in history that is neither directly governmental or otherwise 'total' (a ban or other pressure to eliminate a certain kind of discourse means virtually nobody hears it, no matter what the one wanting to say it tries to do about it - usually an outright government-backed ban on something - which is not relevant here. There are plenty of other platforms out there).