>>409074this is about the power to shape information:
At the moment the capitalist class, who are just a tiny fraction of society controls most of the information ways.
They control mental production of society and all ideas that can be broadcast to large amounts of people, are modified to reflect the interests of the capitalists who own the huge media empires. But It's not just about who owns the media production and distribution, there is also censorship by the name of "intellectual property" .
Non of this is even remotely compatible with the free flow of ideas. Pay attention of the ideological trick to reduce freedom of expression to absence of state censorship, if all the information paths are owned by huge corporations that enforce draconian rules as user agreements than the state doesn't have to do any censorship while you still don't get to freely express your ideas.
We have to say that in a socialist society media production and mental production has to reflect the material interests of the proletariat to get the kind of funding and professional production that it can reach masses of people. So we would invert the economic marginalization of ideas that exists in capitalism, but we don't need to outright censor anything. even if we would be justified in doing so, because the capitalist media does censor socialist ideas.
There is another aspect to this, capitalism uses information warfare to bypass your intelligence, like with endless repetition of advertisements, that burrows information into your head against your will. Or more sophisticated ways of pushing your psychological buttons. AstroTurfing campaigns with click-farms or bot-farms, that basically do man in the middle attacks of the debates that happen in society. Or anything where you treat humans as meat that has it's behavior and mental faculties manipulated by a series of audio visual stimulations. I don't see how any of this can be reconciled with the concept of freedom for expression for ideas, because ideas don't matter anymore if you can hack the brains of other people.
There is much more nuance that can be had here:
Like who can set the reference frame of discourse and ideological premises. And of course there is the old saying that the medium is the message and who decides about the format of the medium ? There are biological effects like information can be addictive and depressing, but it can also be good for mental health and educational. Face book is clinically proven to cause depression, some people might pose questions about public health consequences, and say they want to get rid of the digital version of toys that contain lead-paint, what then ? how do you arbitrate this ?
How about the twitter mobs that try to go on which hunts to cancel the blasphemers and the people that are possessed by demons, or whatever they are calling it these days, does that count as censorship or as free expression ?
>What about ChinaSocialist countries that don't have enough media production capacity to compete with the capitalist machine have to do media protectionism until they have the strength to level the playing field. I guess China's firewall is justified until they catch up with American cultural soft-power.