Free speech is great if almost everyone is reasonable.
America is not nearly there. Empirically, free speech has failed, as an insane fraction of American citizens are vaccine hesitant and believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
The US should have handled this exactly like a sane country: - No lockdowns. You determine your individual risk level. Businesses are free to require masks if they want to. (I really would only be okay with a compelled wfh order, if possible.) The gov owes a lot of people a lot of money for compelling them not to work. The gov wouldn't owe money if consumers just stopped shopping places because they didn't feel comfortable not wearing a mask in a business that didn't require them. - Vaccines rollout is: take it if you want. We recommend it. It appears to be safe. Here is the data. If you don't want it, fine, but we are business as usual so you're accepting a higher risk.
Perhaps there is no way, in a liberal society, to have a silver bullet? It turns out principles matter in such situations.
This is a smear. Communities of Color are vaccine hesitant and for the most part do not believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. It's gross of you to ignore the legitimate concerns of Communities of Color and to declare them election conspiracy theorist. You're attempting to lump together diverse groups into a single "not like me" group for your own ideological convivence. This is disgusting.
Lumping all these groups of people together as was done here is a great example of the mindless zombie tribalism going on, which in large part is a result of propaganda.
There is a pretty large closure of ideas that now get you pegged as "one of the Bad People" for even stating them publicly, without strongly held support. For example, even suggesting that our election systems in the US are horribly broken or just merely flawed, a widely accepted bi-partisan position just a few short years ago, puts you into the bucket of being a "horse-paste consuming, anti-vax, insurrectionist, conspiracy monger." I wish this was a strawman, but it ain't.
The problem being that democracy, even representative democracy, also only works if almost everyone is reasonable and (tying back to speech) informed. Once you give up on the population being reasonable, it's a short step to saying that someone "reasonable" ought to control what they see and rule over what they do "for their own good, of course". Even if that happens to be true, down that road lies madness.
Hilariously it seems to be that empiricism has failed. One does not generate a meaningful framework of human morality from non-transcendent scientific conclusion other than utilitarianism which in itself is conceptually flawed because each human presents hundreds or thousands of immeasurable and constantly moving targets. This is intractable. It is also why, despite the leaps and bounds in technological advancement, people still have to put in their 40 hours. It is why a CEO can rake in ~300x that of the company's average employee. It is why a large swath of the population must undergo the risks of debt peonage. It's why people feel that populist ideology should be inflicted on everyone, despite various circumstances - by the very definition a slave master relationship, the same sort of relationship virtually everyone rails against. Which brings me to the final point, I am not your property, and I suspect neither of us wants to be the property of the government or of corporations. I will assume they neither you nor they have property rights over me and thus I will consume and defer as I so please, but do go and inflict your blind ideology on to me.
More seriously, what would be your solution to a country where two major power blocs both believe that free speech is acceptable so long as it stays inside their respective overton windows?
Why there are only likes and not option of "I think this is stupid" or "I don't think it's true".
Confirmation bias is a helluva drug. It encourages people to agree with those they like and disagree with those they don't. Sometimes those biases can be overcome with time and patient reasoning but in the hyper-connected, engagement-driven world of social media that rarely happens. In-group/out-group preference kicks in and people start defending those in their group against attacks of character, lending a false sense of legitimacy to their ideas - the ideas born of confirmation bias instead of logic. At a large enough scale, this results in a social divide perpetuated by echo chambers.
The problem isn't the evidence, the details of which many people wouldn't understand or care to know, it's the credibility of the people making recommendations based on that evidence, and the way they have conveyed those recommendations.
The public-facing people championing public health have long since lost credibility but they aren't being replaced in an effort to restore public trust. That's the problem.