Consider that 234 years ago, long dead individuals wrote in a statement calling for there to be “or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”.
Emotionally this sounds good, but consider. In a our real universe, information is not always a net gain. It can be hostile propaganda or a virus designed to spread rapidly causing harm to it’s hosts.
Yet in a case of ‘bug is a feature’, until recently most individuals didn’t really have freedom of speech. They could say whatever they wanted, but had no practical way for extreme ideas to reach large audiences. There was a finite network of newspapers and TV news networks—less than about 10 per city and in many cases far less than that.
Newspapers and television could be held liable for making certain classes of false statements, and did have to routinely pay fines. Many of the current QAnon conspiracy theories are straight libel and if the authors and publishers of the statements were not anonymous they would be facing civil lawsuits.
The practical reason to allow a freedom of speech today is current technology has no working method to objectively decide if a piece of information is true, partially true, false, or is hostile information intended to cause harm. (we rely on easily biased humans to make such judgements and this is error prone and subject to the bias of whoever pays the humans—see Russia Today)
I don’t know what to do about this problem. Just that it’s part of the reason for the current extremism.
I think the current era is a novel phenomena.
Consider that 234 years ago, long dead individuals wrote in a statement calling for there to be “or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”.
Emotionally this sounds good, but consider. In a our real universe, information is not always a net gain. It can be hostile propaganda or a virus designed to spread rapidly causing harm to it’s hosts.
Yet in a case of ‘bug is a feature’, until recently most individuals didn’t really have freedom of speech. They could say whatever they wanted, but had no practical way for extreme ideas to reach large audiences. There was a finite network of newspapers and TV news networks—less than about 10 per city and in many cases far less than that.
Newspapers and television could be held liable for making certain classes of false statements, and did have to routinely pay fines. Many of the current QAnon conspiracy theories are straight libel and if the authors and publishers of the statements were not anonymous they would be facing civil lawsuits.
The practical reason to allow a freedom of speech today is current technology has no working method to objectively decide if a piece of information is true, partially true, false, or is hostile information intended to cause harm. (we rely on easily biased humans to make such judgements and this is error prone and subject to the bias of whoever pays the humans—see Russia Today)
I don’t know what to do about this problem. Just that it’s part of the reason for the current extremism.