Enrique, it is good to know your view on this, thanks for posting.

The issue of censorship seems always highly political.

The practice of censorship is always very damaging and highly unfair to some party or another, however it is done.

No matter if we decide the information we see and hear is good or bad, it is still information.

At the very least, and sometimes at its most horrific, it is information conveying the existence of something which is not as it should be, something that should be corrected, in the eyes of decent folk.

We need to see the raw information, warts and all, to know what to do about it, and the people who should be deciding what to do with it are just… the people.

Indeed social media is sometimes used as an instrument to carry out awful crimes against humanity, but we should not forget that at the same time, that same use provides us with undeniable evidence of the crime.

Take what happened to George Floyd for example.

When we watch that awful film of him being callously murdered, we are left with the uneasy feeling that the killer is not only aware of the camera, but may even be deriving some kind of sick pleasure from it, thinking perhaps the publicity likely to come from it would somehow benefit him, or perhaps some cause or another.

As we can see, it is doing quite the opposite.

And the issue of racism pre-dates social media by a very long way.

Of course he, and now his colleagues who were obviously also supporting his action, must be corrected.

Thank god it was captured on camera and streamed to the world, uncensored.

We can easily guess the parties who really wish it could somehow have been kept quiet.

With such widespread visibility of all things happening throughout the world, perhaps the people of the Weimar would not have been so easily led to do the awful things they did in the lead-up to WW2 either. Who knows, we might even not have had that awful war, or any other, if we’d had such powerful social media.

Ideally, there should be nothing added, and nothing taken out.

That means no censorship, and no ads, which probably means there must be no profit motive whatsoever for the platform.

It should be owned by the people.

You are an educated man. Perhaps you will appreciate looking at the issue from the point of view of Metcalfe’s Law, an implication of which can be interpreted as follows:

All members of the network must have equal, maximal visibility of all of the information of all other members in the network, in order to maximise the value of the network, where value is that which is seen as benefitting humanity as a collective (nothing to do with profit).

Further, on studies of the “Wisdom of the Crowd”, it is academically accepted that a condition for it to be true, is for all members in the crowd to have equal visibility of the raw source information.

A crowd running towards a cliff edge would all stop at the edge, if they all saw it coming.

Uncensored social media is not making things worse, it is making them better, I think.