You could ask this about any forum and it would be pertinent, or you could ask why left wing societies like the USSR, China etc always have more censorship in g

You could ask this about any forum and it would be pertinent, or you could ask why left wing societies like the USSR, China etc always have more censorship in general than the right. Here's one theory for you to try: leftists/progressives in general are much more concerned with speech and language control than non-progressives. Why is that? Well, this ideology or philosophy or whatever you want to call it, is fundamentally about the Power of Man to reshape the world through the Power Of Ideas. Ideas in turn are objects manipulated entirely using words. So, people on the left believe very deeply that words and ideas are very powerful. Not the implementation of ideas, but the ideas themselves. That is, merely articulating an idea can itself change people and thus the world, almost immediately! They therefore elevate and protect "intellectuals", using Sowell's definition of people whose primary status in society depends on their production of ideas. People not on the left (I don't think the right is really a consistent thing worth talking about as a coherent unit), generally don't believe that to the same extent. They are much more concerned with implementations, practical experience, the evolved wisdom of traditions and so on, and may find many ideas to lack common sense, be wishful thinking, etc. What happens if you deeply believe that merely hearing words can significantly change the world, or people's beliefs about the world? Well, then controlling what other people say becomes critical. After all, if someone writes some anti-progressive ideas then other people might see them and change their beliefs away from progressivism, which would be terrible. But if you can't directly control it, then hiding the words is the next best thing. Forum downvotes are the second best option available to hide a post, abusive flagging is of course the best and so if you turn on showdead and browse https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active so you can see flagged posts you'll see that anything anti-progressive in any way gets flagged very quickly regardless of any merits the story or post may have. What can be done? Mostly, better forum software would fix this. The mechanisms for getting posts pulled or reranked need to be divorced from abstract voting, where it's never really clear what a downvote is meant to mean (mere disagreement vs "get rid of this post" for other reasons). Fully algorithmic ranking, for example, would allow heavily downvoted posts to nonetheless be at the top if they scored well on other metrics. However not many people make or run forums so such ideas don't get much experimentation.