Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever screams at us the loudest. (from S2 Andor)

The loss of objectivity is one of the greatest losses. People who are online to want their trench to “win” are advocates for loss. People who abuse their position to only proclaim their side is the best, the all-knowing, the superior, or whatever the flavor is of the day, are advocates for loss.

And as we have seen, we are losing a lot by losing objectivity.

But social media is also uniquely good at developing "negative polarization". Some of the counter movement was organic simply because people hated the progressive wins they saw.

If you ban or censor a book, you immediately make the book seem more valuable. Because governments aren't omnipotent and all restrictions can be overcome (see the war on drugs as a particularly recent and pertinent example), you just Streisand-effect yourself.

If, on the other hand, you take away the popularity and social status of those who read that book, branding them as gullible idiots in the popular imagination, people will have an aversion to reading it. You don't need to ban access to the book, in fact you shouldn't do that, just make sure that talking about it will get people to lose all their friends.

Social media are the modern arbiters of popularity. If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"

I don't think it sounds true. Pre-internet, information distribution required access to specific technical tools, and physical transportation efforts. As one of USSR dissidents noted, risks of distribution grew almost exponentially with amount of pages (and it's about imprisonment, not account deletion). For comparison, emailing so far works even in very repressive countries. And even narrowing the issue to the West, while free speech suffered a lot recently, shadowbanned account is probably still works better than hectograph.

There's an endless source of information if you look for it. Just because social media doesn't stuff them in your face doesn't mean they're censored.

On the other hand, you can shove proof in people's faces and they'll still find reasons to argue against it. Information availability is not the problem. It's more energy consuming to search and filter information so people largely avoid doing it.

There's a trope in movies where the antagonist is secretly recorded and broadcast so regular people finally see the truth and wake up. I've seen journalists risking their carriers to expose corruption only for people to shrug and look the other way.

It is trivial to concoct believable lies as compared to the effort needed to debunk them in a way that is effective at social scale.

Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary? Those who have the resources to do that do not have sufficient motivation. Often the motivation to do the opposite is stronger.

“Fighting disinformation” is the banner under which free flow is necessarily interrupted.