Not at all. The parent that I originally responded to stated
> We have a myriad of evidence that societies that suppress the truth for "the public good" [end badly]
To believe that that statement is relevant you must believe that "covid-19 is caused by 5G towers" is, or could be, the truth. Otherwise you have to defend the much stranger position, that societies which knowingly suppress information that everyone knows is false don't end well, which is silly, I know of no society that has ended badly due to its attempts to suppress things that everyone agreed were false. (and by this I mean factually false, not ethical concerns etc.)
If you don't believe that, then you agree that by suppressing Icke, we aren't suppressing the truth, so there is no danger. If you do believe that, you are misinformed, and it's a good thing we're keeping disinformation away from you.
Now, you might argue that I've constructed a catch-22, and you'd be correct if I thought that this was a generally applicable solution, but I don't. While not every piece of information is obviously untrue, some are. "Covid-19 is caused by 5g towers" is one such piece of information. It is also, apparently, dangerous when people believe it.
There's lots of other opinions that I find distasteful or whatnot that I don't believe should be deplatformed because they are clearly false, that is reserved for things which are clearly false.
There's no issue of censorship here, because on the off chance that Icke is right (which again there isn't), he could do a study and submit a paper to the relevant academic circles, and resolve the issue. In other words, society again, isn't suppressing truth, they're suppressing cranks. Which is reasonable. Cranks are bad and distract us from getting actual work done. Most of the time we can just ignore them, but every once in a while a crank gets ahold of an idea that is both wrong and, when believed by a small but fervent group, can be dangerous to everyone. In those cases, keeping the idea from catching on further is good.
Again this applies only to things that are provable in nature, not things of the form "we should overthrow the bourgeoisie".
So yes, the central point is that nothing Icke says is anything remotely approaching the truth. In other words, libeling a concept should be reasonable to deplatform, since libeling an individual certainly is.
> We have a myriad of evidence that societies that suppress the truth for "the public good" [end badly]
To believe that that statement is relevant you must believe that "covid-19 is caused by 5G towers" is, or could be, the truth. Otherwise you have to defend the much stranger position, that societies which knowingly suppress information that everyone knows is false don't end well, which is silly, I know of no society that has ended badly due to its attempts to suppress things that everyone agreed were false. (and by this I mean factually false, not ethical concerns etc.)
If you don't believe that, then you agree that by suppressing Icke, we aren't suppressing the truth, so there is no danger. If you do believe that, you are misinformed, and it's a good thing we're keeping disinformation away from you.
Now, you might argue that I've constructed a catch-22, and you'd be correct if I thought that this was a generally applicable solution, but I don't. While not every piece of information is obviously untrue, some are. "Covid-19 is caused by 5g towers" is one such piece of information. It is also, apparently, dangerous when people believe it.
There's lots of other opinions that I find distasteful or whatnot that I don't believe should be deplatformed because they are clearly false, that is reserved for things which are clearly false.
There's no issue of censorship here, because on the off chance that Icke is right (which again there isn't), he could do a study and submit a paper to the relevant academic circles, and resolve the issue. In other words, society again, isn't suppressing truth, they're suppressing cranks. Which is reasonable. Cranks are bad and distract us from getting actual work done. Most of the time we can just ignore them, but every once in a while a crank gets ahold of an idea that is both wrong and, when believed by a small but fervent group, can be dangerous to everyone. In those cases, keeping the idea from catching on further is good.
Again this applies only to things that are provable in nature, not things of the form "we should overthrow the bourgeoisie".
So yes, the central point is that nothing Icke says is anything remotely approaching the truth. In other words, libeling a concept should be reasonable to deplatform, since libeling an individual certainly is.