Free Speech vs Misinformation and Social Media vs Broadcast TV

Kevin Drum comes down firmly for unregulated speech on social media, while completely ignoring a variety of issues.


We must distinguish between free speech (ideas that challenge us) and mis-information.  And we need to do that in the context of an election that was heavily influenced by a foreign state organization, and produced a result that is seriously screwed up.  While it's screwed up in the sense that a Republican won the election, that is not the issue.  The issue is that a racist, corrupt, "grab em by the pussy" person won the election.

The scale of the media system is vastly important here.  Not only does Facebook reach a broader geography than TV, it also has vastly higher bandwidth.  Facebook can deliver at least thousands of variants of a single message.  It can deliver millions of distinctly different messages.  And a different subset of those millions of messages are delivered to each individual, allowing the individually most effective messages to be delivered.

The lack of human oversight in determining what gets published and consumed is also an issue.    The inability to determine and hold accountable the author of a message is also a problem.


Here's an example of the difference between free speech and mis-information:

A couple-few years ago, climate deniers stated that the climate had not changed in 17 years.  This is not a valid logical argument because the starting point was a cherry picked anomalously warm year.

In the local newspaper a couple of weeks ago, someone stated that the Swedish economy had grown more slowly than the U.S. economy because the Swedish economy is more socialist than the U.S. economy.  This is misinformation because it is not a valid logical argument.  Economic growth is strongly dependent on population growth and the U.S. population has grown faster than the Swedish population. 

These are not "ideas that challenge us".  And the flood of misinformation blocks the transmission of ideas that challenge us.