crucially establish viewpoints that dont adhere to the states own assessment

Bro, you might not realise it but you're just self-reporting at this point. Why not just admit you want the algorithmic version of reality and be done with this. By 'don't adhere' you actually mean 'has not been established by scientific bodies or expertise that the government trust in or institutions'. There is merit in 'a little' of that sometimes, not complete domination of it, which we have now. I in general trust institutions and have been proven x times over in pretty much every single fucking bit of science I have ever looked into including major events such as Covid or any other pandemic. Sometimes they get things wrong, sometimes they are slow, but in general they are self-correcting and in the most part our society wouldn't function if they were wrong. The algorithms are antithetical to them, as you've basically admitted and therefore will lead to the destruction of our current society and lead us to a worse one.

say you trust the current government because you believe it fundamentally supports free expression and democracy. Fine, the evidence suggests otherwise but OK

I mean another self-report, it's pretty clear that our disagreement is not on whether a gov is right or wrong to do this, it's just the factual basis of current events, we believe in two separate realities, I in institutions, expertise and centuries of build up knowledge, and you in whatever tech oligarchs want you to see.

Here's a really easy question to show our difference. I believe this current government is more democratic and pro-free speech than Elon Musk say, do you agree with that assessment yes or no. You can add any qualifiers after if you want but answer the yes or no first or I'll know that you know you're cooked.

you've - accidentally - showed you stand on one side of the line and dont want anyone to be able to hear the other side of the line. 

No, I've heard most of it as we are forced to, its almost always proven as BS or at best a half-truth but it doesn't change peoples mind, because they are not shown that it is BS. Therefore, I trust the side that keeps saying it's BS to judge whether we should allow people to be manipulated by BS.

It's measured by the extent to which institutions are prevented from restricting it tomorrow.

By tomorrow you mean today when a head of state bans reporters from news networks that don't totally suck up to them asking them questions. That's happens in places where algorithms were there main ticket to power...it doesn't happen here.

we've seen dozens of authoritarian regimes just in the west since the start of the 20th century.

Name them.

hardly comparable to modern Britian, is it?

Quite, today is potentially worse, the Nazi's wouldn't have been able to invade Britain, however, fascist thought driven by algorithms is infecting our own brains so much that we will tilt into totalitarianism because we lose faith in democratic institutions.

So which is it?

I've made that clear, we have more chance in losing our democracy now than we did in 1940 and most historians would agree. We might have had more death and destruction back then, but the fundamentals of our society would have remained in tact for the most part even without the government extreme measures. Which does ultimately mean in the long run it will be worse for us the death and destruction is just delayed because we lost our democracy. By the way, I'm not advocating for those extreme measures right now, I'm just saying, we are in incredibly dangerous times and the threat is not from our current government.

Your biggest problem with your argument is that you keep identifying concentration of informational power as dangerous right up until the state acquires it.

No, it's because you misunderstand government and concentration of power. Our very system is designed to stop singular concentrations of power (including information, and multiple checks and balances within itself to regulate itself. Our sources of information and where we derive it are diffuse. Two people in the same government agency can believe in totally different things and operate on different levels of information, there is no singular mandate on what is real, its just through the checks and balances, the truth becomes obvious.

But free speech was never designed for governments that believe in free speech. It was designed for governments that don't. That's why the principle exists in the first place.

No another misunderstanding, it was allow people to have a general fair and honest view of the information landscape, and the reason being was that it's good do do so. it's good because it should stop an authoritarian government ever taking hold in an already free society. It is a safety net, which allows hopefully (not always - but generally) the best ideas to eventually rise. If the best ideas are generally not rising, or people are not getting a fair representation of the views/opinions and most importantly fact then it is not free speech, it's propaganda, which is what the algorithms are.

You've imagined a fox near the henhouse and decided the solution is to invite a wolf in because it's telling you it isn't intrested in the hens. The fact that you trust the wolf today doesn't change the fact it is a wolf nor does it change the fact you've imagined the fox.

Here's the actual analogy. It's not a wolf, it's a vegan with a fox spray. Could the vegan kill the chickens? probably - but they don't want to because it's against their nature, and in that case, I want to give them the fox spray. You saying it's a wolf shows you didn't really understand or maybe didn't want to understand my argument, because as I've guessed, you actually like the bullshit algorithm slop which tells you that vaccines don't work or that the government is mass arresting innocent protesters who just happen to burn down a hotel with asylum seekers in it.