>I guess that brings me to your comment about "free speech". It seems a little petty to point you to the usual put-downs about how the phrase "shouting fire in

>I guess that brings me to your comment about "free speech". It seems a little petty to point you to the usual put-downs about how the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" has historically been deployed to /silence/ people trying to /stop/ mass violence (because they are seen to be trouble-makers). The speech regulation problem feels fairly different depending on whether the team doing the regulation lives in the society they're trying to regulate. If you live in the society you're trying to regulate the speech of: * People in your society will attack or praise your speech regulation actions, as moves in the local political chess game. * As a member of society, you are likely to have a "dog in the fight" for a heated discussion where someone calls for speech regulation. * As a member of society, your thinking (including your thinking about what to censor) is affected by what you read, which is itself affected by what speech gets censored. There can be a feedback loop. In the US, "freedom of speech" used to be a left-wing talking point, back when the right had more cultural power. Nowadays it is a right-wing talking point, at a time when the left has more cultural power. We generally can't expect censorship mechanisms to be used in a principled way. Censorship mechanisms are powerful political tools that powerful people will fight to obtain, and they will be disproportionately wielded by the powerful. See, for example, Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. Contrast all that with the Facebook/Myanmar situation, which I suspect is more a case of criminal apathy and/or greed.