How was free speech in the .. non-modern world any different?
These days a throwaway tweet or blog post can be seen by millions before there’s been any chance to debate the argument on a smaller scale (and either refine or abandon it)
In reality, while it is easier to broadcast your message to people all around the world in modern times, people still need to "really believe in an idea to help it spread". Unless you're already famous, just because you put it on a platform with potential millions of viewers doesn't mean that you'll actually get millions of viewers without trying really hard.
It's like the Birthday Paradox. The chances that someone in a room shares my birthday are small, but the chances that two people in the room share a birthday is large. It just takes a few of the millions of tweets to go viral.
I won't address your second point at length except to say that it's naive to think that with the ease of broadcasting, suddenly the wall is at rebroadcasting, which can be done with no more than a click and is significantly easier than creating the original message.
Thee fact that 99% of Tweet are irrelevant doesn't abnegate the fact that millions of Tweets from 'nobodies' are broadcast daily and do impact the world.
Journalists decide on an editorial angle and chose random tweets to support their narrative.
Entire articles are written on random tweets.
You don't remotely need to be 'famous' to have massive social media impact.
In a civilization of self-seeking individuals, the objective of communications will be self-aggrandization there's little incentive in promoting the truth.
The point of having professions is the expectations that the professionals will be, well, professional.
It's like if someone in the early 20th century took random excerpts of someone shouting on a soapbox at an intersection, but published it on the front page of a national newspaper unfiltered. I'm pretty sure no one back there would have seen much value in doing that.
The life of ideas and clichés is largely independent of celebrity - if it hadn't been one twitter star that picked up some pithy arrangement of words that fit the zeitgeist, it probably would have been another.
The trying really hard part is just to be in the middle of things, and if you're successful at that, when you're the 1 out of 100 people who said the same thing, you're the one that gets the credit because you have 2M followers.
It’s funny that “virality” was once seen as a positive feature of social media. Gad Saad, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, explores the concept of “idea pathogens” (that infect minds and spread like viruses) in his book The Parasitic Mind (https://bookshop.org/books/the-parasitic-mind-how-infectious...). You can hear him speak about this concept in his interview on the Jordan Peterson podcast (https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/gadsaad/). Social media is the breeding ground for idea pathogens.
If it ends up being food poisoning at some unacceptable rate of occurrence with provable link to McDonalds burgers, I would welcome investigations and incremental improvements. What I wouldn’t do is call for McDonalds to be defunded/abolished, or for fast food to be replaced by an alternative food system, or label anyone who disagrees as racist, or inject my ideology into schools/companies, or censor those who disagree. Nor would I participate in repeated rioting resulting in several deaths and billions of Dollars of damage.
Instead I would work within the system, in a legal and civil manner. I would welcome an open debate in the spirit of classical liberalism. I would want a nuanced understanding and nuanced set of actions to result.
Lastly - would I spend time defending McDonalds on forums? Probably not since it’s not that important to me and I have other fast food choices. But I only have one local police force to depend on. And the safety of my own family and property hangs in the balance. So I would definitely engage on that topic.
You know what the actual problem is? That this number is larger than zero at all. Police violence in the US is completely nuts, there were 999 deaths in 2019 alone. The population-adjusted number from Germany is 55 (actual deaths by police were 14). Which is still too much.
But my main point isn’t to debate policing. It’s that reasonable discussion is disallowed due to vague content policies like banning “hate speech” (very fluidly defined) and the ability for coordinated brigades to mass report and block dissenting viewpoints. This allows one sided unrefined ideas to be the only ones in circulation, and they get amplified without anything to slow it down, without anything to add nuance.
Because, as stated, apparently police other countries manages to cope with dangerous situations without killing everyone in sight. Keep in mind that most of those situations aren't hollywood-style standoffs - many of the victoms are e.g. mentally ill during a psychotic episode etc.
> This made me feel the system by and large is working well.
We are talking about 2000% higher kill rates compared to other industrialized countries (Germany isn't particulary peaceful, just average).
No, this is because extremely online people fight each other by begging the owners of websites to censor their enemies. It has nothing to do with the bad argument, which John Birchers would see as ancient.
It makes you not want to venture anything online, or at least anything with your name attached to it. I have a deep fear that something dumb but pithy I've said will become a flag for morons long after I realized that I was completely wrong.
Pre-modern zombies weee much harder to find under Napoleon for example. His famous aphorism "I prefer lucky generals" was a reference to the ability of Marshall Ney to shoot two zombies in the head at 100 yards with one round.
Abraham Lincoln, Zombie hunter was actually a biopic.
The notion goes far beyond narrow views of 'scientific reasoning'.
Integrity, far from 'unscalable', is an essential factor in the functioning of civil society and probably the #1 predictor of a successful ongoing civilization.
The difference between a rich and poor country is sometimes 'natural resources' but more often than not highly organized social order based around institutions and systems with integrity. In everything from 'Sushi Chef' to 'Parenting' to 'Early Childhood Education' to 'DMV' to 'Drug Regulation' and 'Accounting Principles'.
Yes, it would be nice to have an objective truth but we don't need that to know that bribing a or shooting a cop is 'bad'.
Often, they were abused.
But at the same time, central entities are considerably more knowledgeable than individuals.
The CDC is a rational source of information about COVID - even if it's not perfect.
Your average neighbour is a very bad source.
We now live an era wherein the immediate payoff for hustling lies or partial lies is much greater than the act of having constant integrity, wherein the payoff is much longer, possibly even not even within a single lifetime, i.e. it takes decades of conscientious behaviour within groups to advance civilization.
Looks like ppl get fed-up with "free speech" very easily. Especially when they assume they're "obviously right!" :-)
[1]: Some limits apply (slaves, etc.).