>Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.
There were cases of this happening, often in the South, but in many other places it was not common practice.
The consolidation of much conversation onto 'platforms' with the internet makes the act of censorship a lot more obvious, and tends to set people's 1984 alarms off more. We mocked China for deleting scores and scores of Weibo comments, but here we are doing the same.
No, “we” are not doing the same. In China the state compels private companies to hold and enforce certain positions toward certain speech. That’s exactly what the “anti-censorship” lobby is asking for, and it’s not at all what is happening today in the US.
Today, you have private companies managing content on their own platforms according to their own policies. The government can and does ask for certain actions and, unlike China, companies are more than welcome to decline those requests.
Indeed, the relationship of the state and business does differ in China. In the US it is more decentralized.
To the person who considers the outcome of something like Weibo covered in deleted comments and only having survivors parrot narrow lines, this is a bad thing, even if the cause differs.
I’m not an expert on censorship in China, so I won’t weigh in on that, but in the US it’s a non-issue. If you can’t discuss some conservative view on Twitter, move over to Truth Social or Gab or the many Mastodon instances that exist explicitly to host that content.
There were cases of this happening, often in the South, but in many other places it was not common practice.
The consolidation of much conversation onto 'platforms' with the internet makes the act of censorship a lot more obvious, and tends to set people's 1984 alarms off more. We mocked China for deleting scores and scores of Weibo comments, but here we are doing the same.