First, let's dispense with the idea that anybody is a free speech absolutist. Nobody is. No site is. Not even 4chan is (ie CSAM is against 4chan ToS and is policed).

Second, some ideas just aren't worth distributing or debating. There's a refrain "there's no point debating a Nazi". What that means is there is a lot of lore involved with being a modern Nazi, a labyrinth of conspiracy theories. To effectively debate a Nazi means learning all that lore so you can dismantle it. There's no point. In reality, all you end up doing is platforming those ideas.

I'm actually shocked at how ostensibly educated people fall into the anti-vax conspiracy trap. Covid definitely made this worse but it existed well before then. Certain schools in San Francisco had some of the lowest child vaccination rates in the country.

As a reminder, the whole vaccine autism "theory" originated from one person: Andrew Wakefield. He was a doctor in the UK who was trying to sell a vaccine. The MMR vaccine was a direct compeititor so he just completely made up the MMR link to autism. He his medical license because of it. But of course he found a receptive audience in the US. He is and always was a complete charlatan.

Likewise, the Covid anti-vax movement was based on believing random Youtube videos from laymen and, in many cases, an intentional ignorance in the most esteemed traditions of American anti-intellectualism. People who are confidently wrong about provably wrong things who had no interest in educating themselves. Some were griters. Some were stupid. Many were both.

We had people who didn't understand what VAERS was. (and is). We had more than 10 million people die of Covid yet people considered the vaccine "dangerous" without any evidence of side effects let alone death. As one example, you had people yelling "J'accuse!" at hints of myocardial inflammation from the vaccine. But you know what else causes myocardial inflammation? Getting Covid.

If you're excited by this move, it just further highlights that you have no idea whta's going on and zero interest in the truth. What's happening here is big tech companies capitulating to the fringe political views of the administration, a clear First Amendment violation, to curry favor, get their mergers approved, get cgovernment contracts and so on.

Regardless of your views on this or any otehr issue you should care about capitulation by social media sites in this way.

This comments on this post are just a graveyard of sadness.

The problem with those "ideas that just aren't worth" is the usual, who decides?

In my country of origin, you get called a Nazi simply for being opposed to the war of aggression that it is currently engaged in. In US, we have a long history of "terrorist" and "extremist" being similarly abused.