The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

I disagree with this statement. Free speech has no say on who "wins". Free speech is based on the principle that everyone has a right to be vocal about what they believe, even if you disagree with it. The alternative is giving up the power to others to decide who can speak and for what reason, whether you agree with it or not.

Many people don't want to hear this, but if hypothetically the majority of a population believes in and talks nonsense, then that's what the population wants and that population should live with those consequences. What we have here is not a political problem, but a human problem, and involving politics as a bandaid has shown time and time again that those doing the censoring don't do it for the "common good". Corruption and self-interest is attractive to people in those positions, again, because they are humans and what we have is a human problem, not a political problem.

The difference between the former and latter manifestation of human problems is that in one a small group of imperfect humans make the rules for the rest, whereas in the other no one decides who can say what and people get the consequences they bequeath upon themselves.

Highlight on truth and power.

Now it's being co-opted to allow for propaganda, disinformation and even far-right apologists.

It's kind of like that common saying that pure evil is the belief that there is nothing left to know. That's what losing free speech does. It's society thinking "our system right now is the best" and not bothering to try and improve things.

That's not to say that they were losing every battle, but the fact that they were losing some battles--that some portions of their narrative were just too easy to falsify in an era where any 4channer could grab some data from the DoJ website and make a memeable infographic--that was enough to cause the turn against free speech:

> https://www.city-journal.org/democratic-candidates-racism-cr...

> Yet key parts of the intersectional narrative are not born out by data. It is now a standard trope, implanted in freshmen summer reading lists through the works of Ta-Nehesi Coates and others, that whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks. That may have once been true, but it is no longer so today. Just this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its 2018 survey of criminal victimization. According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.

I should also point out that the NYTimes ironically has its own well-documented history of disinformation: famously downplaying both the Holocaust and Stalin's purges as they occurred.

This isn’t remotely what the work of Ta-Nehesi Coates even remotely implies so it’s clear you haven’t read their work.

You then go on to cite interracial violence statistics and imply they are racially motivated either way. Your intent and bias are clear.