You ignored my previous comment and replaced it with a straw man. No one is saying that the only way to combat bad ideas is through authoritarian means. That's a conclusion that you are drawing. How can you combat bad ideas in any way, if you don't first understand them, and how can you understand them if you can't study them?

And yes, I firmly believe there is such a thing as "bad ideas" in the sense that they are harmful. Can that be abused? Absolutely, but we can't over-correct and say that no idea should be labelled "bad". Take climate change. For years science told us it was coming. Misinformation about climate change has made it harder for us to do something about it, and now we're living the reality of extreme weather events. Why would we not want to know how that misinformation spreads, and how best to combat it?