Knuth writes in the beginning of The Art of Computer Programming that he will deliberately lie to the reader, to further her understanding of the main subject.
> if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society
I understand this can make sense, when reading capacity of each individual is limited
When you get a advance warning about a "lie", is it really still a lie? Although I would argue that even if it is, the warning is enough for you to establish consent to be lied to, so it's not actually harming you. Real censorship is different.
Of course, the real problem with censorship is that whoever ends up in charge of it, automatically gets immense political power - including the ability to suppress opposition to censorship, thus perpetuating the arrangement. I would argue that the only reason why we haven't seen more abuses of that yet is because the Internet infrastructure was not originally designed to make such large-scale censorship easy, and as this changes more towards centralization, censorship will be more pervasive and more oppressive, as well. Countries where the government could mandate infrastructure tailored to censorship (e.g. China) are a good example. Now, some argue that, so long as functioning democracy is retained, it doesn't matter, because any such censorship in a democracy would be majoritarian in nature, and thus it's a fundamentally different and justifiable case, but one only has to look at historical moral panics in various democracies to see the flaw in this argument.
I think this is actually very insightful. What if we agree with Knuth, and we add "but only sporadically and in a limited way"? That's a much more subtle and interesting line of thought.
> if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society
I understand this can make sense, when reading capacity of each individual is limited