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> ..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.

John Stuart Mill

https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html

Should all expressions of opinion be given equal weight? Is an average person able to evaluate what's factually correct, and what's not?

Just think of all the assumptions that you need to make when you figure out "should I take a COVID-19 vaccine":

* Is this vaccine safe? What do I know about the companies that are making it?

* What even is a vaccine? Are they all the same? How do the different ones work?

* Is COVID-19 even real? Have I personally witnessed people getting sick? Is there statistical evidence that large amounts of people are getting sick? Is the death rate worse than the average flu?

* How do we even know this is transmitted between people? Do masks work? What even is a virus? How do they grow and replicate?

* Are doctors lying to me? Do they have an incentive to? How do I fact-check these claims when I can't travel around the country and see with my own eyes?

* et cetera

You have to rely on some assumptions to be able to answer these questions, which is the whole point of having an educational system at all, and necessarily prioritizes ones that we have deemed "correct". Is this authoritarian? Should we just let children loose on Twitter after they're born and have them re-derive all information for first principles again?

Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.

-- Ronald Reagan

"be given equal weight"

By whom, that is the question? By the listener? Probably no.

But once you get committees and probably bots (b/c there is not enough people to judge the entire information flow of today) that decide the weight of X using some flexible criteria for others out there, the bad actors will do their utmost to influence them and get them under control.

And, ten years from now, hey presto! Whatever the Prime Minister does not like, will be classified as misinformation.

This system is accountable to Darwin, not Newton. It evolves.

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/darwin-newton/

The probem is that here on planet Earth, governments are made out of humans.

You may not believe it, but when you give a human the power to censor what would make them lose power ("fixing the issue" is how they describe it), it has been historically hard to make them stop using that power.

But that's not the worst. The worst is the other, powerless humans, who nonetheless cheer for the powerful humans to be able to censor them! What do they have to gain? Fleeting feelings of superiority over a different set of powerless humans, at best. And a one-way trip to the Gulag at worst.

So you see, in your planet things may work out fine, but here it's all a bit messier than that. Take my advice, go back to your planet where you know what are the "issues", and how to "fix" them.

> People do not always have good intentions

The statement about valuing intentions over outcomes applies just as much to bad intentions as to good ones. People with bad intentions don't always do harm, any more than people with good intentions always do good.

As for actual outcomes, I don't think the case is anywhere near as one-sided as you appear to believe. See below.

> Fixing these issues, whether by government, tech industry, or otherwise, will involve some level of "authoritarianism".

No, "authoritarianism" is what caused problems like your relatives' beliefs. That "previous status quo of large centralized media groups" did not just evaporate; it killed itself by throwing away whatever "journalistic ethics and transparency" it once had (and one can argue that it never had very much; it was just that before the Internet there were no alternate sources of information available so people could see how much politicians and the mainstream media were lying to them). Your relatives believe random Internet sources as much as NBC Nightly News because they know NBC Nightly News will lie to them--because NBC Nightly News, and all the other mainstream media outlets, killed their own credibility.

Why did they do that? Because they thought they were authorities and that the public would regard them as such--since before the Internet the public had done that, because the public had no choice. In other words, the mainstream media thought they had the authoritarian power to declare what is true, even if it's actually a lie. They still think that; it's just that the number of people who don't treat them that way any more is much larger now, and will only continue to grow.

I am all for making things better, but every time I see the "it used to be better" argument I think you were just younger and more unaware then. People used to gossip about many untrue things that are now more easily disprovable with a simple Google search. There were more cults in the past. Mass media loved running with shallow scientific papers (everything became low fat and high sugar for example). The National Inquirer sold way more copies than the Atlantic.

The mediums are different now but the problems are still the same. Give it time and we will figure it out.

> Fixing these issues, whether by government, tech industry, or otherwise, will involve some level of "authoritarianism".

This seems to be what most people expect, that someone else will solve the problem, that someone else will have to step in & take responsibility for all the irresponsible people.

I disagree with this. I think it's up to us. Right now we rely on platforms to communicate & respond, to marshal direct responses. Which is unfortunate. These groups all have their own safe-spaces, have their own moderated environments. They have coordination & dissemination & protected spaces, as they exploit the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle/Brandolini's Law, as they poison & make other spaces unsafe.

What's missing, to me, is some good cross-platform ways to register dissent & disagreement. The aegis, to me, is not other people. It is us. A -1 vote, that we can deploy easily, that we can reinforce each other on, anywhere. Let disagreement be known. Those who want to go further ought bring Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS)[1][2] up & online to talk about the things they have seen online, to link the world of mis-information into their own structured, defined refutations, and let others amplify & support those refutations. Link more, structure more. Do it on our own turf, consolidate our responses, and most of all, support each other, follow each other's feeds, plus one the links, plus one the arguments.

More sunlight, use this great internet, use speech, to cleans away so many of the darker shadier rots. Society, building some aegis, some protection, to shield itself, to let good voices amplify & support each other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue-based_information_system

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfIZY0s1JG0

But the nefarious way is nothing new : Weapons of mass destruction capable of reaching the capitols of Europe, The Russians are bad and would invade Europe if it wasn't for us / nuclear weapons, They hate us for our freedoms etc.

The authoritarians are as nefarious.

> "Free speech is a good thing" - Sure, but that means 4chan, QAnon, anti-vaxxers, and the like also get loud, free speech now.

Echo chambers are very powerful tools. People don't like to find out they are wrong and modern media platforms make it very easy to surround yourself with content which re-affirms your existing beliefs. It's also extremely easy to unintentionally trap yourself in an echo chamber. The content feed algorithms on most popular social media platforms are basically designed to trap people in echo chambers in order to maximize engagement.

All of the groups you mentioned maintain their limited popularity by capturing their members in information echo chambers. The thing is, people can only be released from echo chambers by exposing them to alternative sources of information. Giving any organization the power to restrict free speech is dangerous because you essentially give that organization power to legally enforce echo chambers.

Personally, I feel safer having fringe groups like QAnon and anti-vaxxers running around than relinquishing that sort of power to any organization.

I don't think there's a good, consistent way to limit "bad" speech, while allowing "good". I personally have no problems with anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and conspiracy-theoretists being able to express themselves. I do have problems with something that doesn't fit the current narrative being declared a conspiracy theory by some group and banned on this basis.

Bingo. They get off easy by calling it authoritarianism. It's correctly called despotism.