The sentence is incomplete. Banning X communities does work to achieve the goal of people not talking about X. I don't think that your linked study is really necessary, the Chinese cultural revolution worked really well (to achieve the goal of "preserving Chinese communism") [0]. Imagine if 30 years ago large digital monopolies banned what was considered unmentionable back then. I doubt gay marriage would have been legalised in America. All of the progress that we have in making marijuana more legal would have been terminated by the companies wanting to prevent people advocating illegal drug usage.
Homosexuality in general was effectively banned by dominant platforms in the US for quite some time! It was a BIG DEAL to people when gay characters started becoming more common in mass media.
But note the order it happened. The privately-set standards moved with the times much faster than the government ones did!
Writers/tv execs/etc heard both the pro-equality arguments as well as the anti-homosexuality arguments and made their own choices as they were persuaded to. Many states, on the other hand, never legalized gay marriage before the court decision overruled their laws.
So that seems to show that we should empower private parties to have control over what their platform shows, over either the government or just the loudest mobs (there were MANY protests/boycott threats/etc from religious groups over this). The market gives this the advantage over the government here: the private publisher can test what sells, and over time is going to be increasingly forced to move with societal changes, while the government is much more likely to be captive to small-but-loud contingencies (especially in a gerrymandered world).
> the Chinese cultural revolution worked really well
Given that the lineage in power now (the Dengists) were imprisoned under Mao during the cultural revolution, and only after Mao's death were able to perform a coup, arrest the rest of the leaders of the cultural revolution, and let the Dengists out of jail, I'm not sure that's the case.
Chinese censorship is backed by the threat of arbitrary imprisonment or violence. In that case, it's not really the banning of the topic that's working, it's policing for compliance and de facto criminalization of defiance.
>Banning X communities does work to achieve the goal of people not talking about X.
Honestly I'm not sure that is even accurate, I would imagine it does the opposite. People are drawn to what's not allowed, it's even one of the morals of the Adam and Eve story. Pretty old but still relevant idea of human nature.
Here's an interesting story about Goldberger who defended the Neo Nazis in Skokie.
From a former Communist country: whatever was banned (jokes about the Party or the Soviet Union, various conspiracies or whatever correct-but-undesirable information out there, such as the Chernobyl accident in the first days), spread like wildfire by "whispering channels".
You need to understand that the people who are saying we must ban misinformation are the party apparatchiks, trying to argue in good faith with them is pointless. The only reason to engage is to show the silent majority that they aren't crazy for disagreeing with those in power.
The sentence is incomplete. Banning X communities does work to achieve the goal of people not talking about X. I don't think that your linked study is really necessary, the Chinese cultural revolution worked really well (to achieve the goal of "preserving Chinese communism") [0]. Imagine if 30 years ago large digital monopolies banned what was considered unmentionable back then. I doubt gay marriage would have been legalised in America. All of the progress that we have in making marijuana more legal would have been terminated by the companies wanting to prevent people advocating illegal drug usage.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution