"People don't just read all of other people's things?"

"Sites aren't set up like that. You read through a feed and some things can fail to appear in the feed."

"Huh, okay."

"Countries vary in how much they use this capability."

"Why?"

"Some think it's wrong, some aren't very good at it, some have more or less of the sort of concerns for which it'd be appropriate."

"Do we use it a lot?"

"A fair bit."

"Just for people killing people?"

"Or for convincing misinformation, or pollution hysteria, or illegally copied material, or false accusations of crimes."

Nod.

"Some places do it for criticism of the government."

"...why?"

"Because they do not want people to criticize the government and it's often hard to identify the person."

"Why don't they want people to do that?"

"Well, most people don't like being criticized, do they."

"...yes but that is like making it illegal to play music you don't like."

"Well, people also think that it will lead to rebellions and disobeying the law if people criticize the government."

"Did they check?"

"It's a bit hard to check because, yes, rebellions are preceded by people complaining a lot about the government, and societies with lots of censorship are a bit more stable, but also, societies have to be a certain level of competent and unified to do censorship and that's itself a sign of stability."

"...say that differently?"

"Before a rebellion, lots of people complain about the government online. But that doesn't answer our question, because maybe 'things being really bad' causes both online complaining and rebellion, separately, and the online complaining does not cause the rebellion."

"And making it hard to read complaining doesn't stop it?"

"Yes. So if you were more clever, you might measure whether governments that make it hard to complain have fewer rebellions. And they do! But even this is not good enough. Because in order to police this kind of thing, you need a government that is unified - it agrees internally on what policy priorities it is pursuing - and reasonably competent. And reasonably competent governments are, for many reasons, less likely to suffer a rebellion. So maybe the censorship helps, or maybe it's just that the kind of government capable of censorship is better."

"What about ones that try and fail?"