We went from restricting the sharing of information to making information sharing unpopular.
If you ban or censor a book, you immediately make the book seem more valuable. Because governments aren't omnipotent and all restrictions can be overcome (see the war on drugs as a particularly recent and pertinent example), you just Streisand-effect yourself.
If, on the other hand, you take away the popularity and social status of those who read that book, branding them as gullible idiots in the popular imagination, people will have an aversion to reading it. You don't need to ban access to the book, in fact you shouldn't do that, just make sure that talking about it will get people to lose all their friends.
Social media are the modern arbiters of popularity. If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
You pretty much described why I quit “social” media wholesale. It’s a turf war and nothing goods comes from it that cannot be got elsewhere at a vastly higher quality.
> If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
Isn't this basically just a form of forced compliance ? I agree it's happening, but its happening because the ideas/information is not beneficial for the one who can control the distribution. Before anyone could post on usenet, add their own tinfoil hat blog if they wanted, but take the UK for now, if there is any discussion or interaction with people on your website, the government wants your ID and your users'. It's exhausting.
This is essentially how das kapital got discredited in the public consciousness.
If you browse any CS career forum though, at least 60% of the complaints about "the industry" happen in most capitalist industries and typically have one or more corresponding chapters in das kapital (e.g. one of the various forms of alienation, treadmill effect, capital accumulation, the creation of a reserve army of labour).