What do you do when people simply want to spew emotional tirades and mindlessly copy memes, and won't argue in good or any faith? What is that worth really?
Nothing to do with the medium, but how we structure social media.
Edit: If you're asking me as if I were the host of the free speech platform. I guess I would allow everything except anything that violated criminal law. And would keep a law firm on retainer to field complaints and give the final say to our legal department. It's a tough question.
If 10% of Americans are convinced that QAnon is behind the scenes running the show, and they believe that, and act on it in a variety of ways, then it's a huge problem.
I suggest with the election, COVID and QAnon together we are probably already feeling the results of mass misinformation.
It's an ugly problem because none of us really want to suppress people for saying something not technically true. I mean, who doesn't like a good alien conspiracy theory? Until it gets out of hand ...
The mainstream media says "he killed himself and was a one-off and all these rich people just wanted to solicit charitable donations and there's nothing more to see here," and anyone with two skeptical brain cells to rub together can see that's a lie and (if they are actually moved by the horrendous circumstances of the Epstein case to find out the truth) they go searching for alternative sources of information, at which point they're often easy game for disinfo merchants of various stripes who gain a foothold simply by not insisting they're crazy for even asking the questions in the first place.
The insistence that this is purely a problem of "mass misinformation" seems almost belligerently blinkered to the broader context and reasons why our society's institutions have lost credibility and trust.
Basically, look at the things you cited as the reason such an attack could be effective, even unanswerable. If the rich people, etc etc, behaved better and weren't awful, it would be a lot harder to mount such an attack. But it was made easy to do, and for that reason the whole 'freedom of speech' thing is nothing more than an attack vector at this point. We've lost that. There is no way it's sustainable the way some people would like it to be sustainable. There are powerful interests, state actors, weaponizing every little shred of freedom to destroy Western society, and I don't see any good answers at this point.
It was a weakness. We could have freedom of speech as long as it wasn't being weaponized on a massive scale against us. We could have freedom of speech so long as massive calculated lying wasn't a primary tactic, so long as people could be taken at face value. That's simply not true anymore.
My suspicion is that QAnon is an alternative reality game created by imageboard trolls. But then foreign adversaries saw in it a potential to subvert the US and they decided to amplify it as much as they could. This suspicion is not based on any hard evidence, but I think it is plausible.
Foreign adversaries from troll farms spend their entire day finding ways to cause harm and troll farms are a cheap way to inflict that harm. Unlike the cold war era, they don't have to pay operatives to travel to the US, they just need social network accounts. Remember when Russia interfered with the US election by buying ads in social networks? Those ads are available here:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/05/10/thousands-rus...
All these ads have the objective of amplifying any narrative that is against the best interest of the US. Make everyone angry, make people fight each other, cause economic harm, amplify dissent, diminish governance. And everyone is falling for it, again:
- Foreing trolls amplifying antivaxxers and antimaskers have the objective to make everyone sick and stretch lockdowns forever so that the US economy is ruined.
- Foreign trolls amplifying racists and race baiters have the objective of divide the US into groups and make them fight each other, as well as diminishing trust in the government.
- Foreign trolls amplifying anti-science discourse also have the objective of make people skeptical about science, drive people away from science, with the added bonus of making people fight each other, incentivize pollution, demoralize the population, etc.
However, those foreign adversaries could not be successful if it wasn't for one person: Trump. Foreign adversaries love Trump because he is the person that promotes division and infighting. Trump denies climate change. Trump said vaccines cause autism. Trump said you should inject yourself with bleach, and downplayed the coronavirus. Trump uses racist dog whistling... Trump is the wet dream of any foreign intelligence service, he did more harm to the US than the KGB could ever do throughout the entire cold war. If you voted for Trump, you are not a patriot, you're a giant chump... and if you cannot see it now, there's no hope for you.
QAnon exists because 10-25% of the US population will believe total fantasies, especially those that are biased towards their worldview.
It's about 55% in uncivilized countries.
We are animals, trying to be human. Most of us aren't fully with it. Rationality is a new concept.