Looking back, my April 2021 piece on free expression at The Federalist was exactly when the Biden administration began censorship by Big-Tech-social-media proxy
Censoring the unclean deniers was completely acceptable. No, it was mandatory!
[click on article to go to The Federalist.]
And, the fact that the Biden administration unabashedly announced that they were doing it showed the degree to which society as a whole had slid.
It bothers me so very much that as you were writing the original piece, and government employees and elected officials were evading the 1st amendment with proxy arrangements, many supposed "free speech" organizations such as PenAmerica which bills itself as a "free speech advocacy" organization, literally did nothing to oppose the obvious and bragged about pandemic-related intellectual suppression going on. This morning PenAmerica tweeted information about one of its new resource guides and said PenAmerica had "called upon our respective areas of expertise, including free expression, disinformation defense and media literacy, political and identity-based violence prevention, and strategic communication, to inform this resource guide". When did @PENamerica become about: "disinformation defense and media literacy...and strategic communication" rather than protecting and advocating intellectual freedom? These are very different functions. One is not the other. Here's the document: https://pen.org/communicating-during-contentious-times-dos-and-donts-to-rise-above-the-noise/ Again, if this was offered up IN ADDITION to attending to the core responsibility of protesting intellectual suppression, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But instead of? No.