During the 2016 election, critics warned that failed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton posed a grave danger to free speech and the First Amendment, and eight years later, it appears that the threat from the would-be authoritarian tyrant has not diminished.

Clinton recently confessed in an interview that she still desperately wants to censor free speech she doesn't like or agree with as she warned that the powers that be will "lose total control" if social media platforms don't moderate user content more strictly, the New York Post reported.

As such, she called for the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Act, a piece of legislation that has proven critical in allowing free speech to flourish online, at least to an extent in some parts of the internet.

Clinton wants social media censorship to maintain "total control" of information

Former Secretary of State Clinton recently spoke with CNN host Michael Smerconish and praised the handful of Democrat-led states, like California and New York, that have "taken action" to censor and regulate content on social media platforms, but stressed that more needed to be done in that regard.

"We need national action and sadly, our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children. So you’re absolutely right. This should be at the top of every legislative, political agenda," Clinton said, according to Mediaite.

"There should be a lot of things done," she continued. "We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230, which gave platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs, that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted."

"But we now know that that was an overly simple view, that if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control," Clinton added. "And it’s not just the social and psychological effects, it’s real harm. It’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous."

She later reiterated that legislation was needed to "Remove the immunity from liability and we need to have guardrails, we need regulation. We’ve conducted a big experiment on ourselves and particularly our kids and I think the evidence is in."

Clinton poses a dire threat to free speech online

Hillary Clinton is far from the first or only politician -- on the left or the right -- to call for repealing or weakening Section 230 of the Communications Act, according to Reason magazine, a move that would gravely threaten free speech online and fundamentally change the internet as we now know it.

Section 230, simply put, provides limited liability from civil or criminal action for social media platforms and internet companies over the content that is posted by third-party users. As such, it allows those platforms and companies to decide for themselves how much or how little and what sort of user content they will moderate and censor -- which is a hallmark of a free society.

The law stands in the way of would-be authoritarians and tyrants, like Clinton, who seek to silence and suppress information and opinions that they don't like or disagree with, which is why censorious politicians like Clinton want so desperately to get rid of it.

Clinton wants civil and criminal penalties for Americans spreading "propaganda"

Clinton's remarks promoting censorship on CNN came just a few weeks after she made similar comments on MSNBC about shutting down -- and even taking legal action against -- individuals who share things online that she doesn't like or agree with, according to TheWrap, while discussing recent criminal indictments over alleged Russian propaganda being spread unwittingly by U.S. political commentators.

"I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should civilly, or even in some cases criminally charged, is something that would be a better deterrent," Clinton said. "Because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to stand trial in the United States."

That statement was rather richly ironic coming from Clinton, The Washington Times noted, given that it was Clinton and her 2016 campaign that paid for and perpetuated for years the false and foreign-sourced disinformation about former President Donald Trump's supposed ties to Russia -- fraudulent propaganda that, under her own terms, should make her liable to civil or criminal actions by those she lied about and harmed.