Having lived in a few countries without freedom of speech and freedom of press, this article looks extremely familiar. The basic line of argument is that a blog

Having lived in a few countries without freedom of speech and freedom of press, this article looks extremely familiar. The basic line of argument is that a blogger/journalist/gadfly may not have done anything but amplify existing publicly available information without alteration, but this amplification influenced a third party to act illegally. Even if there's no direct incitement to any illegal activity, it becomes implicitly and self-evidently no longer speech but a criminal conspiracy. The last line of the article is "How much are we going to tolerate?" This framing seems to muddle concerns between someone's else's speech, policy violations being brought to the attention of someone's employer, and illegal activities. Harassment, defamation, concrete incitements to violence and credible threats of violence which meet well-defined legal standards are already illegal with both civil and criminal penalties. Now of course TikTok is a private company and legally there's little obstacle to having a content policy which is more restrictive than the law. Even so, advocacy of censorship in the name of public safety because of potential second order effects on third parties is a fundamentally authoritarian principle. The way I've seen it advanced in other societies is that first the government leans on the private sector, then implements rules in the public sphere broadening the definition of material and moral support for violence until it's so broad as to be totally discretionary. Finally, it becomes both legal and accepted within the mainstream political culture to punish anyone critical of arbitrary censorship as such. It doesn't matter if it starts on the "right" or the "left." Once this achieves fixation within the political culture, whoever is in power currently and typically whoever takes power next (even if nominally their political opposite) will use this erosion of norms to treat opposition speech as criminal. Failure to anticipate the shoe being on the other foot one day is extremely short-sighted, regardless of your political views.