Why does the proliferation of misinformation imply a lack of freedom? Surely it should be the opposite.
Freedom = people do things we approve of
Democracy = people vote for policies we approve of
This seems to be a natural corollary to your argument.
I never argued that 100% freedom is good. Every law we have is effectively a limitation of freedom. But this isn't about determining what freedoms should be protected. This is about an organization who has taken it upon themselves to quantify freedom and by the looks of it their methods for doing so are illogical.
Freedoms can be opposed to each other. In fact, it's more the norm than the exception; different freedoms are in constant conflict with each other.
Rights != Freedom
Freedom is the absence of restraint. A right is an entitlement. They often conflict with one another.
We have many laws which sacrifice our freedoms in exchange for various rights. Depending on the trade, that can be a very good thing. 100% freedom is not desirable.
So, accepting your absolute scenario, we have two diametrically opposed possibilities: one in which it's up to me to slog through the noise to find the signal and another (the one you're proposing) where somebody else does that for me. By now, I think it's pretty obvious that nobody - not you, not me, and definitely not an unpaid "moderator" - can be trusted to filter out just "noise" and not inject their own biases. So, yes, given just those two options I'll absolutely take the option where I have to do the work of filtering out spam myself than trusting some unaccountable partisan to do my thinking for me.
Speech restrictions limit the subject matter if speech, not the sheer volume of speech overall.
You also seem to be conflating the freedom to say what you want with the right to be listened to.
I've come to the conclusion that they're two completely separate problems. You can have spam with no freedom of speech, freedom of speech with no spam, or anything in-between, depending on implementation.
The problem with conventional spam is that e-mail accounts aren't usually tied to real identities (although that's arguably a good thing), and phone numbers aren't authenticated at all, and you don't need any sort of permission to call someone or send someone an email.
This isn't the case with social media platforms (and their analogous "spam"), either existing ones or theoretical ones. Signups are throttled and somewhat tied to a real identity - although even if they weren't, you can easily design a system where, say, you can't send someone a message without their permission (which some platforms e.g. Instagram do), or accounts are un-discoverable by default unless you make them visible.
Additionally, virtually every social media platform in existence gives you the ability to block users (and, very few, if any, people claim that "free speech" means that arbitrary users on a platform can't block you - almost everyone focuses on bans from the platform itself - and you're conflating the two).
Therefore, the virtual equivalent of "five people shouting in my and your ears" is not an issue because there's no virtual equivalent to "blocking" someone IRL, which trivially fixes this problem.
You're conflating "forcing everyone to hear me" (which very few people think is a good idea) with "having a presence on a platform" (which is the issue actually under contention).
In short, the issue that you're describing can be pretty trivially dealt with even when a platform has "perfect free speech" and does not remove any content that it is not legally required to.
...and, because the issue is a non-issue, it doesn't reduce freedom.
The solution to "noise" is give people the choice of if they want that info or not. And to allow people to choose if they want to see it, or choose if they don't want to see it.
It ruins email inboxes over time, without active management, and lots of people no longer answer phone calls from numbers that aren't already in their contact list, to pick just two examples. Are those not adverse effects? If there's more total communication but a given person requires 20% (just to pick a number) more time for the same amount of communication as before, is that more free? It means that person's max theoretical amount of daily signal-not-noise communicating is lower than it had been, and that they have to give up more time that could have been spent on other things, to maintain the same amount of communication.
It's worth noting that nobody - nobody - is doing anything to address that. They are working overtime to prevent Nicki Minaj from sharing a story about somebody she knew who had a side effect from the Covid vaccine. So not only are the beneficent censors shutting down arbitrary conversations, they're also not working on the actual nuisances that everybody might agree would have been worthwhile.
I get that it's in vogue to redefine every word (violence, freedom, harm, etc) to pretend that policy choices don't have trade-offs, but it's a dishonest strategy that's more useful for advocacy than for understanding.
- More censorship of things we don't like == Freedom
- Required reporting of every bank transaction == More security
- Vaccine mandates == Civil rights