What a strange moral compass…
At its most extreme, suppressing information gives your subject no such freedom. You put them in an intellectual cage. You deny them the ability to choose their convictions.
People are not rational actors no matter how much we want them to be.
Turns out it’s really simple to convince people to act against their own self interest on a mass scale with a few psychological tricks.
Someone who knowingly and repeatedly spent their time, money and resources doing that for their own personal gain when they were already at the top of society is worthy of contempt and maybe worse.
Concealing dangerous information from them turns them into intellectual eunichs, and strip much of the vitality from the human experience.