You can pretty much justify anything with the "greater good" slogan. Women wearing Burqas, greater good of lowering promiscuity and increasing family stability is how politicians justify it in the middle east.
Democracy is done in America if more people think the government controlling what people read and think is some sort of social good.
You can have good intentions, but still cause terrible things to happen.
In the last year we saw government's pushing experimental drug on healthy young people in order to add a few extra months of life to 75+ year olds with multiple health conditions, and the extremely obese. Locking down, destroying small business and causing serious food price inflation, that will send millions of people around the world into absolute poverty.
A drug that did not stop transmission, had pages worth of short-term side effects, and yet to be determined long term effects. One thing it did not due, was lower the 3x jabbed from catching covid, since they get infected now at highest rates now. How long before we go from "safe and effective" to "no one forced you to take it".
It really is debatable what if anything governments COVID policy accomplished.
Why shouldn't people be able to debate it?
It's censorship in both cases. What, you think governments that censor don't do so in the name of the "greater good"? It's just that one "greater good" is considered valid enough a justification (by some), while the other one is not.
Not sure it's that clear. Some of China's censorship is in the name of social harmony, which is arguably the government believing it's doing good. Nobody wants riots and civil war, do they?
If Germany blocks sites promoting the Nazi party, is that doing good because such promotion does bad, or is it censoring an opposing political viewpoint that's competing with it for power? Even if the government has the support of most of the population, it's still a political power struggle between them and the Nazis.
When a government tells ISPs to block content that it believes doing so serves a greater good, that is filtering.
You can argue all day about the greater good and if filtering is justified, but the difference is China explicitly censors opposing viewpoints.