The democratic way to fight misinformation is with public trust, a well educated population, and by publishing true information to counter misinformation. Anything less treats citizens as children who can’t be trusted to form their own opinions.
I agree on the philosophical part, letting our governments act opaquely under the veil of national security, inevitably leads them to turn on their citizens. But total transparency will be exploited by foreign powers (likely with domestic cooperation), until those that once defended it are removed from power.
Historically, this kind of control has always been a favored tool of the corrupt. If you build an apparatus of censorship, it will be used to harm the public.
There is a gray line somewhere between surveillance state and revealing all intel, which can serve national security and also diplomacy.
The problem is that this typically ends up shifting corruption towards these sectors, which ends up hollowing out national security.
Things like overclassification are a serious problem.
You know, democracy obviously has its downsides. Should we abolish democracy because of that?
This could have been prevented by blocking foreign misinformation.
> "the essential democratic freedom – freedom of expression – is both ingrained in and potentially harmful to democracy."
So basically you are arguing for the authoritarianism against the democracy. It is just so you seemingly does not like the word authoritarianism and like the word democracy, and are trying to justify the discrepancy by some kind of paradox (which there is none).
Even IF you are right about people will destroy the democracy by their will if that will does not formed by the government, there is still no paradox and that is still called the authoritarianism. By that, you simply point out one of the weakness of the democracy, and suggest the authoritarianism as a better alternative (even if you are refusing to use the correct definitions).
Not the definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
You should really read those Wikipedia articles. Creating and explaining your own definitions and circular logic make you sound like a fool.
Right now, there are foreign actors helping right-extremist campaigns in Europe. Those parties' goal is ultimately converting to Authoritarianism. You can connect the dots yourself now.