People are losing trust in mainstream media because of perceived biased coverage of the Gaza genocide. If that erosion of trust is real, why isn’t it prompting wider public re-examination of historical cover-ups and contested narratives — Watergate, Iran–Contra, Iraq, even shifting beliefs about who “beat” the Nazis? If we don’t question how past information was shaped, what’s the point of preserving evidence (e.g., Gaza genocide evidence recently removed from YouTube by Google)? Won’t this all be forgotten in a few years, the same way all those previous events are no longer discussed?
What’s stopping a sustained, constructive public inquiry into these parallels between past cover-ups and current information control? Where are good, constructive places to discuss these issues without falling into unproductive conspiracy spirals?
This is a really dumb perspective, in general. By that logic I could say, “If Holocaust denialism is so baseless, then why does it get censored so much? If there’s no truth to it, wouldn’t you want people talking about it?” No, it’s censored because it is baseless, because we don’t want people spreading around long debunked misinformation. Just because something is untrue doesn’t mean that people repeating it can’t create confusion, doubt, etc.
I mean, look at all the bullshit propaganda the right puts out, and because they have so much money backing it, strengthening their signal, it’s all some people ever hear, and if some spends thousands of hours watching Fox News, and the other side gets like 20 minutes once a year at Thanksgiving, which narrative they go with is going to have very little to do with what’s actually true.
That same far-right media sphere has spread out from the US to all sorts of small countries around the world. If you look at them, you’ll often find right-wingers in those countries screaming about shit that doesn’t even apply to their country, because it’s what this propaganda network told them to be mad about. I mean, fucking anti-mask protests in Japan, for example.
Regardless of your perspective on Tienanmen Square, this logic of, “If it’s not true then there’s no reason to censor it” doesn’t really hold up.