Recently, Vitalik's comments on "freedom of speech" and "censorship" have sparked quite a bit of discussion. I think his logic is actually quite clear.

The core point is this: criticizing a project as a "corposlop" (corporate-optimized trash product) is fundamentally not the same as censorship. Vitalik emphasizes that I am free to express my opinion that your application is poorly made, and you can criticize me as well—this is a two-way interaction of free speech. But this kind of criticism does not mean I can prevent you from building or using on Ethereum.

He especially highlights an important point: disagreeing with Vitalik's views does not affect anyone's ability to use Ethereum. You can disagree with his opinions on certain applications, ignore his understanding of trust assumptions, or even hold political or personal preferences opposite to his. This is true resistance to censorship—the user has the ability to completely bypass his, the Ethereum Foundation's, or client developers' opinions.

This reflects a distinction between the protocol layer and the individual layer. At the code level, Ethereum must remain neutral and permissionless; but at the upper layers, builders and participants should have the courage to express their principles. Vitalik believes these two are not contradictory.

The "corposlop" he recently criticized mainly refers to products that prioritize short-term gains over genuine user needs. For example, some prediction markets, which he feels overly focus on crypto price betting and sports betting, rather than meaningful information discovery. In his view, this phenomenon is a typical invasion of corporate thinking.

Interestingly, Vitalik also mentioned the issue of "pretending to be neutral." He believes that modern corporate worlds often pretend to be neutral, but in reality, they are making value choices. He advocates that creators should be more honest about what they value—such as freedom, privacy, or other principles—and then reflect these values in their technical choices.

Of course, he also emphasizes that this is just one possible application direction for Ethereum; the protocol's design itself ensures that no single vision can dominate others. Thinking this way, Vitalik is actually defending decentralization itself—true decentralization means that different voices and choices can coexist.