Is 4chan the perfect Pirate Bay poster child to justify wider UK site-blocking?

The game Alpha Centauri had the most hard hitting quote that I think applies now.

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "

> As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.

This had until recently been only tested for top-down information. Nowadays, everyone can be a broadcaster and we're seeing quite different results.

I feel like totalitarians are learning to hack and exploit the free flow of information using sophisticated propaganda techniques.

Doesn’t mean a locked down system is better though. With that they don’t have to bother.

Those are two independent problems. If you have a centralized system, you're screwed, because they just capture it. If you have a decentralized system vulnerable to propaganda techniques then they do that.

What you need is a decentralized system resistant to propaganda techniques.

I mean, just as the phrase goes "your terrorist is my rebel," one could say "your propaganda is my information." That's exactly why a decentralized system matters. It doesn't just resist capture by a single authority, it allows competing narratives to exist side by side. What one group sees as misinformation, another might see as essential context. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate bias entirely, but to prevent any one group from controlling the flow of all information.

And how do you prevent the bad actors from flooding the decentralized systems with propaganda? Nowadays there are millions of bad actors each sending one propaganda message, all slightly different. When any other criteria is not reliable (like source of information, or lack of bias), volume of message distribution (how often that and related messages pop up in the feed) becomes the last indicator people use.