For decades, the notion of free speech was peddled as the differentiating factor between enlightened western democracies and the authoritarian eastern barbarians.

The reason this was possible was because there was a very narrow Overton window in western mainstream. Majority of the population of western countries shared a liberal worldview. This system worked because quality of life that westerners enjoyed was generally better than the rest of the world and this reinforced the idea that liberalism was the best system possible.

The lifestyle in the west is largely subsidized by brutal exploitation of the countries the west colonized. However, as Lenin notes in his Imperialism essay, capitalism inevitably turns the process of exploitation inwards towards the heart of the empire and this is the phase we’re entering now. The wealth of the west is increasingly becoming concentrated with the oligarchs, and the material conditions for the majority are rapidly deteriorating.

The collapse in the standard of living has opened up the Overton window much wider. There is no longer a single mainstream world view in the west. The liberal centrist narrative is shrinking while both the left and the right are growing. Most of social media platforms in US share a liberal bias because that’s the predominant ideology in the tech world. Now that there is a significant number of voices outside the liberal mainstream we’re seeing platforms like Twitter starting to censor speech that falls outside liberal mainstream.

It’s pretty much unheard of for liberals to be banned on Twitter even when they say absolutely heinous things or spread misinformation. The same standard that’s applied to the right and the left is not applied to the mainstream.

The notion that these companies don’t care about politics is pure nonsense. However, the belief that this is the case is entirely real. People who hold mainstream views often see themselves as being apolitical. And they see the mainstream as the natural order of things.

The west starting to admit that a certain amount of censorship is in fact necessary for a society to function cohesively. This negates one of the strongest arguments the west had for its superiority.