Scenario from hell #2:

Obviously it is neither.In my experience news articles are very difficult to find. Newsweek has undergone a number of changes of ownership since 2001 which may make it even more problematic. Failure to find an article (if it ever existed) means little.If InfoWars was ever banned from YouTube for reposting material from Wikileaks they came back. The more recent bans have been for hate speech and misinformation.There is nothing in the Constitution which compels private companies to give a soapbox to anyone who asks, no matter how vile. Indeed the First Amendment grants private companies the freedom to refuse to host content.

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Search Engines refusing to allow (non virus, non pornographic) sites to come up in searches could be seen as a free speech issue.

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It’s only a Constitutional issue if the government forces them to hide sites.

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Operating systems come bundled with browsers and search engines.

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The search engines supplied with the OS - I assume you mean Siri and Cortana - aren’t the ones you’re complaining about.

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I think that a censorship policy should be an antitrust issue, and the OS should be required to have a toolbar from a non censored search engine

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I don’t think it’s an antitrust issue unless you show collusion to suppress information. Microsoft doesn’t force use of Bing, Google allows other search engines. Apple doesn’t even have a search engine as such. And which search engines would be “non-censored” anyway? Forced speech is also a Constitutional issue and you seem to be heading that way.

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We need a constitutional amendment that enables the people to have a right to have knowledge. A right to know. News articles vanishing present an existential threat to humanity, in my opinion.

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The fact that you can’t find a twenty-year old article doesn’t mean it’s vanished. Especially when you’ve found it. And it’s on the Newsweek site: We’re at War

Seems you can buy from backissues.com if you really want it. Or check eBay.

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I will just say that I never heard of the ",Dark Web" until the last year or so.

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I’ve known about it for a while - a lot of it is criminal. Credit card fraud, drugs dealing, and so on.

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It seems that alot of sites are getting erased from existence.

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It doesn’t seem that way to me. But sites come and go all the time.

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I was glad to hear that the illicit porn sites have been driven there, but it seems that 98% of Dark Web sites tend to be political in nature (albeit many have had posters that advocated for violence, at one time or another).

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I really doubt that. I can’t imagine that less than 2% are criminal.

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The other issue:

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The censorship, on social media platforms, seems collusive - and to a fairly large extent. So, an antitrust context it is within.

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It doesn’t seem that way to me at all. What evidence do you have of collusion? Don’t forget that you thought there was a big constitutional issue because you couldn’t find a twenty-year old news article even though it was on the web and was indexed by search engines (that’s how I found it).