Fake Facebook News Is a Disaster for Political Discourse

There's a huge push for this story recently. Been seeing it across aggregators and outlets.

It falls into the same pattern: "Something must be done! This is something! Let's do it!"

The crisis over free speech, and questioning whether we still want it, is a pattern that has been experienced across self-censoring emerging authoratarian nations around the world and throughout history.

In the US, it's followed the pattern put together eloquently by the highly influential American legal scholar Cass Sunstein, whose highly distinguished book "Democracy and the problem of free speech" he stated that in "light of astonishing economic and technological changes, we must doubt whether, as interpreted, the constitutional guarantee of free speech is adequately serving democratic goals."

Sunstein here represents much of the Washington establishment: if free speech doesn't achieve the goals that the center of the state has for society (stability and the acceptance of Washington narration), maybe we need something else.

Right now the State is hoping continued joint stewardship and curation of free speech by partnerships with information and media companies can prevent the free speech it doesn't like and magnify the speech it does. We should have mixed feelings about that, because if it doesn't work the state is likely to intervene more directly to achieve the goals that it wants.

A sad place to see America experimenting. With its credibility destroyed from decades of duplicitous doublespeak, illegal wars bolstered with ham fisted propaganda, and excruciating and embarrassing revelations in recent torture and surveillance programes - the US has been seeking not to bolster it's own reputation but to control and silence sources of information that threaten it's newfound weaker credibility position.