He is an unreliable narrator, for sure. But more than his claim about whether he was brainwashed, does he sound like the kind of person who just mindlessly clicked from Youtube to Youtube, accepting every claim uncritically? Does he sound like the kind of person who can't be trusted to think for themselves? Engineer is a common profession for terrorists. Regular, thoughtful people can radicalize themselves, and censoring the masses to stop that is a power grab in search of a problem.
Everyone has to be trusted to think for themselves. We can put barriers in place to harmful actions resulting from those thoughts but I would not want to live in a world so dystopian and authoritarian that we intentionally take away someone's ability to think.
I don't really get this. People regularly quoted Osama bin Laden's statements about how he did 9/11 to force the US into overreacting. It may have "normalised" him to see that he had rational reasons for what he did, rather than being a religious maniac. But it didn't make it right, and it didn't lead to people flocking to his cause. If it had been censored, we might have had more people believing the harmful "religious war" frame, just from not knowing any better.
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations" -- Osama bin Laden
It's been pretty widely dissected and explained why he said and wrote all of that idiotic internet leetspeak in his "manifesto".
There is also a reason why many of these folks who finally decide to kill people also consume "alt-lite" content like Ben Shapiro / Jordan Peterson etc, it isn't a coincidence.
Regulating that and keeping people from spreading racist propaganda, or content that just exists to undermine democracy is fine in my book.
I tried googling "why did christchurch use leetspeak" and didn't get results. I presume it was to get more views from incels and because he found it funny. Not because he was radicalized by the Navy Seal copypasta.
With Peterson and Shapiro I feel like you're trending toward a standard of "anything terrorists like to read, but I don't, should be censored". They're close to as popular as, say, Rachel Maddow, which means almost all of their readers are peaceful.
