People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is, definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take place when something isn't said, not when it is.
> I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.
You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this website but even just in general, to find anyone who disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself included, who agree that damage is done in the way you mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by censorship.
The person you're responding to is clearly not referring to any effort to censor Galileo today. They are observing that he was censored by the authoritative figures of his day for spreading what was then considered "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage" he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he was much more correct than the people who censored him. This begs the question of why we should believe the authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to suppress lies.
Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is going.
Well I could throw out a number of examples, any of which you may reasonably disagree with and all of which are by necessity controversial, so I don't think there's value in steering the conversation in that direction. But asking for a specific example is rather missing the point - we are discussing the idea of censorship, not the merits of any individual controversial claim or figure. We don't know which examples of ideas being censored will be looked back at years from now as times when the truth was trampled on. And since we can't know, we can't afford to censor, no matter how convinced we are today that something is a lie or BS.
For the sake of not dismissing your question entirely though, even though I believe it's not the right question to ask, I'll offer up the covid lab leak theory and everyone who argued in favor of it. Decried as a racist conspiracy theory and actively censored from social media for over a year, but now accepted as at least plausible, even probable.
People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is, definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take place when something isn't said, not when it is.
> I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.
You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this website but even just in general, to find anyone who disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself included, who agree that damage is done in the way you mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by censorship.
The person you're responding to is clearly not referring to any effort to censor Galileo today. They are observing that he was censored by the authoritative figures of his day for spreading what was then considered "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage" he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he was much more correct than the people who censored him. This begs the question of why we should believe the authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to suppress lies.
Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is going.