If you have not lived under the rock you might have already noticed that currently there is lots of censorship in mainstream media at least here in western world. Lots of things is happening all around the world and lots of things has happened in last couple of years but the mainstream media has been silent and still seems to stay silent in many cases. On some issues media does not stay silent, but semes to give quite one sighted opinion what is going on.
If you are wondering what I mean, I am refering to things what has happened around Covid, Covid vaccines and protests against those vaccine mandates.
It feels ironic that many western people (at least here where I live) seems to have this strange attitude that "we have democracy and a free press as well as freedom of speech" and then they remember to tell that at least we have not living under the dictatorship and we have are not censored unlike peole in China and in North Korea. I also believe that we are not as much censored than people on those countries, but can we really say that our freedom of speech is much better if we there are still lots of topics what you cannot talk about in Twitter (at least previously, don't know now), Facebook, YouTube and others?
Or can we really believe we have possibility to get infromation freely
when search engines removes and changes search results if they are not
something we should know about? If that is the standard that you have
freedom of speech as long as you search only things you are allowed then
there is as good freedom of speech in China as well.
When the Covid was the biggest thing in news there was not much different opinions allowed or shown in public mainstream media. Surely there was some where experts told that this fear mongering has gone out of hands and Covid is not much different than other flus but soon those views were forgotten and all focus was again how everybody should take the vaccine and how it is the only way out of "pandemic".
There was not much talk about natural immunity, how masks are useless, how Covid is not very dangerous for most of the people, how there is shady things happening in contracts between Pfizer and EU etc. in mainstream media. If you tried to point out that there is something shady going on, you were just the heretic conspiracy theorist whom should be sacrificed so the cult of covidians could live happily in ignorance.
Now couple of years later we have seen again news even in mainstream media how natural immunity gives good protection and how masks has been useless. No way, who could have known... except those conspiracy theorists of course.
I don't even know what is saddest thing about this. Media is feeding the fear for the normies, normies are scared and then they try to force their dumb behaviour to others as well. Media is silent about different results what goes against the narrative what leads average people think that the "Science" has settled and they have consensus what is the situation even that was never the case. Different results were just silenced.
Because of one sided news in mainstream media people were led to believe that vaccines are safe and effective, covid is a pandemic what will kill millions and millions of people if everybody is not taking the vaccine and those who are sceptics are just dumb and dangerous tinfoil hats who should be forced to take the vaccine.
This whole covid era shows how dangerous mainstream media and censorship is. Also it shows that most people do not have much media critics and we can fall very easily again to another Nazi Germany. If casual people are trying to force others to take vaccine because of their own fear of death and they will allow taking away basic human rights from those who do not obey then it is just insane. At least this teach us how dangerous media and normies can be.
Some might argue that when situation about the virus is unclear it is better not to allow different views to be in public so people do not start behave against what is wished for. I understand that point of view as well, but I just don't believe that it is correct way to work. If people are not getting realistic news about different results what goes against the main narrative of news then it is not news anymore - it is just a propaganda.
If we believe that people should be protected from their stupidity and tell them only one version of "science" then we are just growing more and more stupid people in societies. If people are taught to belive that we are always getting correct information by experts and news then it will lead results what we saw in covid era. It was just a fanatic cult where it was wrong to question anything what the priests of the cult, so called experts, told. Of course there were lots of other experts who told another viewpoints but sadly average people believed that the correct experts are those whom are shown in TV - not those whom were found in alternative media sources.
If we aregue that people can be protected with silence and censorship then why we don't just block the whole internet from people since it is possible that always there is "wrong opinions" and "wrong info"?
Censorship is sickness and freedom of speech is the cure. Only way we can grow in knowledge is when we have possibility to see different views, conspiracies or not. When we silence different views and trust only those experts media has chosen to speak we are just making things worse in short term as well as in long term.
Censorship leads to corruption and is dangerous to all societies, much more than any conspiracy theory ever.