Say what you will about the CCP, it's naive to let a foreign nation have this much impact on your subjects. The amount of poison and political manipulation that are imported from these platform is astronomical.
If it was bad for Biden admin, it's much worse for Trump admin - he campaigned against it.
It’s shameful that this happens. Is it bot voting? Partisan cheering over productive conversation? It’s troubling.
(They don't necessarily exclude each other. You need both positive preemptive and negative repressive actions to keep things working. Liberty is cheap talk when you've got a war on your hands.)
How am I supposed to learn what’s going on outside my home town without trusting the media?
It's so much easier to stop one source than it is to (checks notes) educate the entire populace?!? Gosh, did you really say that with a straight face? As if education isn't also under attack?
If we could just educate people and make sure they don't fall for scams, we'd do it. Same for disinformation.
But you just can't give that sort of broad education. If you aren't educated in medicine and can't personally verify qualifications of someone, you are going to be at a disadvantage when you are trying to tell if that health information is sound. And if you are a doctor, it doesn't mean you know about infrastructure or have contacts to know what is actually happening in the next state or country over.
It's the same with products, actually. I can't tell if an extension cord is up to code. The best that I can realistically do is hope the one I buy isn't a fake and meets all of the necessary safety requirements. A lot of things are like this.
Education isn't enough. You can't escape misinformation and none of us have the mental energy to always know these things. We really do have to work the other way as well.
And once you know you need pre-screening, the question becomes why not just provide it instead of making people hunt it down?
Applying that to information and propaganda, users should have some automated defenses (like ad blockers), but also manual control of what should or should not be blocked, and also education and tools to be better informed when taking manual control.
In neither system should we remove manual control, education or automated help. They all act in union to make people safer.
Some people die (often children) by opening doors while a vehicle is moving or before it is safe to do so.
However, this also impedes the ability of rescuers to extract people from crashed vehicles (especially with fail-dangerous electric car locks).
Is it safer to protect citizens from themselves or empower them to protect themselves?
In my perfect US, both would be done:
"Dealing with disinformation" as a semester-long required high-school level course and federally mandating the types of tools that citizens could use to better (read: requiring all the transparency data X and Meta stopped reporting, from any democracy-critical large platform).
While also mandating measures to limit disinformation where technically possible and ethically appropriate (read: not making hamfisted government regulations, when mandating data + allowing journalists / citizens to act is a better solution).
Treating children as children is fine and expected. Treating adults as children is not. Protecting children from disinformation, under the assumption that they lack the experience, education, impulse control, and expectation to handle information security themselves is fine. The government can also be an acceptable party to define this for children, even if some parents will object to not carry that role. An alternative could also be to make the parent liable if they fail in their role to protect their children from information harm.
Going back to auto-lock-on-drive doors, giving the government remote control of the car doors with no override, including the driver door, is unlikely to be acceptable to the adult driver who own the car.
Sarcasm aside, we tend to focus too much on the means and too little on the outcomes.
Take Reddit, for example. It's filled with blatant propaganda, from corporations and politicians. It's a disgustingly astroturfed platform ran by people of questionable moral character. What's more, it also has porn. All you need is an account to access 18+ "communities". Not exactly "enlightening material" that frees the mind from tyranny.