It is not so black white. It is a dilemma. There is great value in freedom of expression. But fake expression with the explicit intention to mislead is not so good. It would be best if the population would be better at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
The idea that you can't have a foreign nation control the main channels that the population gets their news from, and that their population spends hours a day of their free time staring at, is black and white. And that's the core.
These are thoughts that occur to me too when a safetyist progressive (for want of a better term other than "woke") suggests shutting down information to prevent people seeing the wrong ideas.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
In fairness I think shutting down “wrong ideas” is just what people do when they think their ideas are prominent and want to protect that.
It’s almost weird the way we talk about free speech in 2026, looking back at the 20th century and the Hayes code, and how staid music and TV were prior to 1985-ish. I’m not
defending the censors you’re talking about here - in fact from the other side I might argue there are a whole bunch of perspectives that made it from academia to the pages of the New York Times that never should have escaped. And I make that argument as someone who studied some of this stuff in college.
Maybe my most unpopular of opinions is that - I don’t know if I agree with censorship persay - but I’m not sure it’s healthy the way we’re all in a deluge of all these perspectives. You could get rid of 90% of content in the world and 90% of people would never notice.
> But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum...
I, frankly, don't. A lot of these conversations stop because of statements like this. You're assuming a set of priors that make your argument make a ton of sense and assuming other people agree with them as well. Take away that as your prior assumption and other viewpoints make a lot more sense.
There's a term for the phenomenon that I don't recall but there's a trap people fall into where they see themselves as the only one who can see through the lies and everyone else is falling for it. I think that happens a lot when people talk about "bad ideas".
I don't think it's the ideas existing that is the problem. I think a focus on the ideas is a distraction from the question of what are the conditions that make these ideas attractive to people?
As an example, I dislike Trump immensely. However it's not at all surprising to me that people voted for him for a lot of reasons but I think the best example was in what is probably the best political slogan/ad I've seen in my life, "He's for you, she's for they/them."
I don't think the problem was Trump, I think the problem was the choice being Trump's ideas and the ideas he was up against being.
>There's a term for the phenomenon that I don't recall but there's a trap people fall into where they see themselves as the only one who can see through the lies and everyone else is falling for it.
Possibly "naive realism", which I agree is a major problem, but I don't think I'm guilty of it here. The only premise of my argument, namely that democracy requires a shared understanding of facts, is widely accepted.
That may be the term but I recall it as a little more closely related to how I phrased it though probably not as clinical.
I don't necessarily think you're guilty of it but I do think the premise you're proposing hints at it.
I wouldn't argue that democracy doesn't requires are shared understanding of the facts. The argument I'm making is that the motivation for people to believe certain things often is the root of the "problem", rather than the existence of things for them to believe.
Notably, I think, The shared understand of "the facts", is a convenient over-simplification. The real world situations where someone has "the facts" wrong, isn't usually a question of fact or fiction really, it's a focus on the emphasis of the narrative being spun. A reading of the same story comes of very different, even with shared facts, depending upon which parts of the story you think are important.
The usual disagreement on a lot of current events isn't what actually happened. Fringe elements will argue the plain facts but the majority of people are disagreeing about why something happened, not what happened.
Nothing to disagree with particularly in what you say. I tend to frame this as divergent values.
Example. 100 illegal immigrants crash a border fence. Someone whose values makes them unbothered by immigration will think: Big deal, it's only 100 people, anyone who worries about that must be racist. The other person will get worked up because even 1 illegal immigrant is an affront to the sanctity of nations and borders. Both sides agree it was 100 people, yet somehow neither can imagine that the other side is sincere in their convictions. This seems quite common.
It's true though, these people exist. There's bias in everyone, but it takes a special kind of arrogant to call a large portion of the population "cattle" because they are in disagreement.
