The last 5 years have really made question the benefits of free speech in our hyperconnected world. My knee jerk reaction to defend free speech has certainly been dampened by the efficacy of disinformation campaigns in the West.
The challenge is to make it through those adolescent years in a good way.
The current state of hyper connectedness has really come upon us all quickly. We weren't really ready for the challenges—we didn't really foresee what they would be.
There was a lot of naive optimism. I'm still optimistic, but maybe just less naive now.
Now that tech literacy is starting to become the norm, maybe we can advance to reasoning soon.
If you find yourself saying, "yes, but it could work if only...", I'd suggest you are failing to understand human nature.
True, but what is new is that disinformation campaigns can utilize popular online platforms to communicate directly with susceptible individuals on the scale of billions of people. That has never existed before and private companies are clearly struggling to address it.
> Free speech is what prevents disinformation to have total control.
Unfortunately, disinformation doesn't need total control to be able to hijack a democracy, it just needs to be effective enough to keep the electorate wanting to support the officials that disinformation supports.
To be clear, I'm very much on the fence on how we should move forward on this issue. But we now clearly live in a world that no longer has a commonly shared truth. One's perception of truth and belief in leadership style, or even the existence of criminal activity depends largely on your political background.
How to even categorize and how to introduce friction against these is the hard problem of free speech.
As long as someone contributes to a discussion that's valuable, even if their idea has a very low probability to be true/useful. But if they are simply repeating the same thing, they stopped contributing, they became noise.
> My knee jerk reaction to defend free speech has certainly been dampened by the efficacy of disinformation campaigns in the West.
These disinformation and smear tactics is indeed mostly driven by almost every group in the political spectrum but certainly used by the extremes on both sides. In the online side of things, we shouldn't believe everything we see or hear these things on the internet because now: text, images, sound, video, livestreams and now historical archives can be faked and replaced by AI tools.
The worst part is: Everyone is now doing it, even the established media companies.
Which disinformation are you talking about btw?
There are very different levels of misinfo:
- Democrats think Trump is a Nazi/Russian collaborator
- People who think Earth is flat
- People who think Covid-19 is a globalist conspiracy from Bill Gates - so he can inject us with microchip vaccines
- People who think Brexit is an amazing/terrible idea
- People who think QAnon is a real issue
- etc...
It's simply too broad a brush to call it "disinfo", and those who claim to combat disinfo should be looked at with heavy skepticism for this reason. It will get abused for political ends.