This doesn’t make any sense, but you have a lot of very good points there, so let’s try to address some.
I think the U.S. government has better ways to censor a newspaper than the Chinese government does, so let’s ditch the cold war agenda and take Venezuela as an example:
Suppose I’m a Frank Zappa living in Venezuela and I want to read every newspaper I can get my hands into, the more, the better. But my national government say it’s wrong and will do whatever they can to prevent me from reading the New York Times, for instance.
IPFS can help me because if I know the hash for the newspaper’s PDF file, I can fetch it in my IPFS node. How would I find out what the hash of the file is beforehand if my government won’t allow me to do even that? Well IPFS can also help with that, because I’m clever and I often refresh my friend’s blog IPNS address which sometimes publish the hash for this week’s newspaper.
Given the above scenario, I’m asking anyone: how can one censor that even more? If someone somehow manages to block the network in a way that a specific hash is blocked in the IPFS network (which is very unlikely - they’ll probably try to block IPFS itself instead), someone with access to the original file could add junk to the end of it, therefore producing a new hash that can be seeded again in the network, and so on.
That would hold true for the anarchist cookbook, the terrorist handbook, the mein kampf, the salomon’s holy bible, etc.
As for plausible deniability, it is a concept that still has to be proved, and so far the cases in which plausible deniability would save someone from being arrested haven’t really worked. We have persons which have been arrested, prosecuted, and even committed suicide. What does work is anonymity.
If you want to securely host and access stuff, there’s already Freenet which is many years in production and it just works ™. Also, more recently we have Whonix which is more versatile than Tails for hosting content.
I’m personally doing personal tests with Whonix and IPFS (and some other communication tools) in encrypted volumes. If one knows what it’s doing, it can be done even on Tails.
This wouldn’t solve the problem with your local despots beating you up until you hand the encryption password (like it’s happening on South America) or the governments you’ve mentioned that would do surgical operations in one’s body whenever they find content they don’t like. For that matter, we would still have to use Free Net or GNU Net, which from the ground up have been specifically being developed with those matters in mind.
So, to clarify my point: in my opinion, putting too much responsibility in the IPFS software doesn’t make sense, because that’s not what would secure your node from the perspective of the privacy concerned. Even with much effort in this matter, it would still boil down to rely on external tools, like disk encryption and IP address hiding / bouncing.