I may regret contributing to this, but I had a thought that I couldn’t leave idle.
Personally, I believe the root of the problem comes from algorithms designed to feed us personalized information that conforms to our beliefs, rather than the simple presence of toxic information on a platform.
Case in point, the YouTube comments section. As far as I know, Everyone gets the exact same comments presented to them. Though some information does get signal-boosted, it’s shown to everyone including those who want to refute it, which helps curb misinformation.
What I often see there is that whenever someone spouts some crazy bullshit, there will a dozen of people who will dogpile on them to refute their points. It may not change the mind of the original commentor, but a neutral audience usually gets the message and understands why those beliefs are unacceptable and incorrect, both educating and inoculating them against future misinformation. No Censorship required.
This system only breaks down in the comments sections of videos made by the far Right, which are only watched by an incredibly deluded niche. Those places are echo chambers that allow insanity to fester since any person who wanders in will see that the sane voices are drastically outnumbered by the insane.
Thus, I believe that the real enemy is the echo chamber and the systems that funnel impressionable people towards them while simultaneously keeping out the educated. To play the game of censorship, is to play an endless game of Whack-a-mole that will inevitably turn awry once the mallet ends up in the wrong pair of hands (like we are seeing now). We must change the flow of information itself if we are to solve this problem for good, and it must be a system that takes advantage of the differences between true information and false.
False and outrageous information only has the advantage now because we naively designed algorithms that ended up biased to give it the advantage. It is not the only way, but it may require the passing of laws to make such changes profitable though.