I like to be able to spot the idiots and know who they are and where they stand, not to put them underground where they inevitably fester into violence in their bubbles.

Allowing the lunatics to spread their message via effective platforms that are designed to promote your brand of bullshit to the people most likely to be vulnerable to it does NOT stop it from festering it actually maximizes the spread of the cancer. If it spreads fast enough you wont have a society to inform anymore because fascists only believe in free speech when its their speech if they gain enough power they will quickly take yours from you.

The people creating propaganda are also interested in enforcing censorship if they are in the position to do so.

Propaganda and censorship work far better together than individually for groups that want to brainwash society into certain beliefs.

The trick is simply keeping people like that out of power.

But since you go on about advertising, that is a way for groups that want it, is to be able to force people to listen to their message. This robs people of their agency to listen to what they choose to. Censorship also doesn't allow people to listen to what they choose to. This makes advertising and censorship very alike. They both result in a persons loss of freedom to choose what information they get.

This idea, that "sunlight is the best disinfectant" does not seem to have much evidence going for it. In fact, surely we're owed some justification for the principle - does exposing widespread misinformation correct the bad effects before it was exposed? Some harm has already been done, and I'm not sure how that is justified by the principle.

I think that principle is lacking in empirical evidence, and theoretical justification for the harms it allows, which seem to be based on a shaky idea of the greater good.

The most egregious I can think of is the Russian government after the Bolshevik revolution. It had the death penalty for being in possession of certain books. In the end these censorship loving people (for other people, not them) killed tens of millions of people they governed (gulags, deliberate starvation of masses of people for instance), yet it is hardly talked about.

These bad effects of not censoring that people talk about seem so pitiful and small compared to what has happened when people willing to censor other people have got into power. Seriously, people stating things like 'sunlight is the best disinfectant" does not seem to have much evidence going for it' are promoting things that totalitarian groups are very pleased to have, and despite asking for evidence, they provide no evidence that what they are trying to push is not far worse than what they are purportedly against. Along with the destruction of freedom that censorship brings to all the people that it applies to. Those that promote censorship can not be hypocritical and start with themselves first, but they won't, I'm sure they will scream loudest about how horrible censorship is if some other group got the power to censor what they may want to say.

I used to think that humans could convince each other of facts using logic and rhetoric. Disagreements would get aired out, and the better "done in good faith" argument would win.

I think our problem is that, as you know, humans are subject to a ton of logical fallacies and 'hack vectors' of rhetoric (see also Shopenhauer's 38 strategems). If we, participating in or viewing an argument, fight to overcome these, we're able to have debates of rhetoric - the "truth" wins out in a debate.

But it's a lot worse than a situation where some number of people didn't learn this in school, or can't be bothered to cut through the logical fallacies. Rather, the problem is that these particular kind of lies have a seductive capacity - they 'feel right', because they operate in the part of human speech and human logic that's driven by our instinct, rather than driven by learned behavior. People aren't neutral, and evenly likely to pick the lies versus the truth - they're overwhelmingly more likely to pick the lies, unless they've both deliberately trained themselves not to, and also personally value objective truth over feeling good. Most people don't - even scientists struggle with this.

Not all lies are seductive like this - but the kind that slot into "tricks of debate" absolutely are. They're the bread and butter of con men.

This is why every formal "forum of debate" - in the sciences or academia et al, has it as just a basic rule that they can just get shown the door immediately if they're caught lying. If you just straight-up-lie on a paper getting submitted to i.e. Nature, it can ruin your career. It's why perjury is a crime - because lies of that type just have far stronger evolutionary fitness compared to truth. It's because the rule-setters in these fields care more about reaching the objective truth than they do about feeling good - and they know how dangerous this is, so they treat it with a scorched earth policy.

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I believe we've been able to get away with free speech because - thus far - most of our media wasn't censored, so much as it was mandated to be "true". You could say whatever you wanted as long as it was plausibly true - people fudged stuff all the time but it generally couldn't be bald-faced lies. As long as that was enforced, then what you said about "good speech being the antidote to bad speech" could work.

But for a few decades, we've had no such enforcement of truth in lots of our media, especially the internet, and I believe the number of people believing outright falsehoods has gotten an awful lot worse. Dangerously so.

That said, you seem to have presupposed that the people doing the censoring are always (or mostly) right. Why? Because they happen to be in power?

Twitter (and I think Facebook) censored the New York Post, even disabling their account, over a major news story that turned out to be true. It went against thev censor's preconceived ideas of how the world is, and they smashed that button as fast as they could.

What makes you think the people doing the censoring are somehow unbiased righteous purveyors of truth, absent their own instinctive biases that mislead then into censoring unfairly? Surely history has shown that to rarely if ever be the case.

I totally agree with your analysis of the problem, but I follow it to a much different conclusion: humans can't be trusted to wield power of speech over others. They are too subject to their own instinctive and emotional reactions to information they don't like.