It’s also an article by Foreign Policy because I didn’t want to get into a spat about sourcing. Mostly it applies to businesses, not people, and unsubstantiated words like “draconian” are doing a lot of heavy lifting. FP likes to obfuscate that fact, but you can see even in what you quoted that they tip their hand on the rhetorical contortions they are doing when they list:

These are often enforced by multiple agencies pursuant to joint punishment agreements covering such sectors as taxation, the environment, transportation, e-commerce, food safety, and foreign economic cooperation, as well as failing to carry out court judgments.

hmm, what do these things all have in common? They all apply overwhelmingly or virtually-exclusively to businesses! E-commerce can, without further elaboration, apply to peer-to-peer interactions like on ebay, and “court judgement” is a similarly vague term, but you don’t get some normal private citizen on charges related to “food safety,” “foreign economic cooperation,” or – based on it not being titled “traffic law” or whatever – “transportation”, and the overwhelming majority of both tax payment and tax fraud is done by the rich.

There is a social credit system for businesses, and their should be. Reddit memes about “-20 billion social credit score” for posting a meme with lego tanks has no place in reality.

this is an illustration of why enforcing ideology is not a good idea

This reminds me of people saying the government shouldn’t “legislate morality,” i.e. be involved in or have a stance on moral issues. In both cases, it seems to me to be oblivious to the status-quo that ideology/morality are already enforced in those respective domains and there is no end in sight for that.

The admin who kindly gave me some of his time indeed already shared the basic ideological tenets of the administration policy. The deplatforming of rudeness, of crassness, and of, uh, “lumping one type of people into a group indiscriminately” are all ideological concerns unless you want to look at it merely as market concerns, as though that changes the fact.

It’s also common practice to at least nominally ban the spreading of misinformation, though our host gave no indication of doing that, and this again is also a highly ideological tenet. If misinformation drives engagement – and we know it can – why ban it? Presumably because it is also a social ill, or because you want to have a positive reputation, etc.

But these are things that are obfuscated in the “Discourse,” thanks in part to the wonderful legacy of classical liberal authors who wanted to find a way to make their ideology look like non-ideology (see Locke using faux a priori arguments to protect the property rights of monopolists).

If you want a comparison, I’ll use the Republican whipping-dog because you are probably familiar with it. Repubs talk a big game about “Small government.” “The government that governs best governs least.” “The most terrifying sentence in the English language is: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” And yet, though they are not alone in this, they are perhaps the most enthusiastic supporters of increasing the power and funding of police and the military! That doesn’t seem like “small government” to me! But that’s because when they talk about “government” in this context, that’s not what they mean, they mean a very narrow subset of laws mostly connected to austerity and corporate deregulation that they want to promote. This kind of double-talk is a rhetorically powerful tool for derailing critical thinking by essentially baiting the listener into conflating cases that are very different.

The blanket denouncement of “enforcing ideology” reminds me of that. Sure, there are bad ways to do it, and you provided an example, but that does not mean it cannot be done well and it obfuscates that it is already being done! The question is not about whether or not to enforce ideology, but what ideological lines to enforce and how. The status quo is not neutral just because we have been habituated to it!

Edit: Total aside, but I don’t believe in natural rights (I think human welfare is better advanced by other frameworks), I was just speaking in terms of the ideology of the Constitution, which does support that idea.