what's more desirable: having all of the extremists congregate on one big website or shut that website down and have a diaspora of different, smaller sites that are even more extreme?
Speaking from 30+ years being online in one form or another: That doesn't work. It has never worked. The public know censorship when they see it and correctly identify it as weakness. It doesn't silence dissent -- it encourages it.
That's why great care is taken that they don't see it. How often do you, on Facebook or Twitter, see "This message has been censored/had its visibility limited due to [reasons]"?
They put up fact-checks under a post sometimes, but what those fact-checks mean for the visibility of a post is left to your imagination. If a post or link is outright censored, you don't find out about it until you try to post it. As their censorship intruded even into so-called private messages on those platforms, even in a 1-to-1 conversation, sending something prohibited doesn't show any kind of "Prohibited content censored" message to the recipient (even non-spam).
They'd much rather you don't know they're censoring anything.
They would, yes, but obviously they're not very good about it. Everyone knows they're doing it, and on what basis, too, which rather defeats the purpose and clues people in that there is something about that message which is dangerous to the interests of the censoring party. And here's the thing: The reason everyone knows about it is that on a long enough timeline everyone posts something that offends the perpetually offended.
