Earlier quoted context omitted.
> even former Prince Harry recently called the 1st Amendment "bonkers" Shocking! I'm starting to think we Americans are going to have to overthrow the British monarchy to protect our rights! > Even The Atlantic publishes its doubts about it. Unlike the Prince Henry thing (who cares), I read this one. The Atlantic says the exact opposite of what you say it does. It starts and ends firmly defending American style free…
A ‘better’ Atlantic article in this sense is https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid... subheaded “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.”
"Two events were wake-up calls. The first was Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about the astonishing extent of secret U.S. government monitoring of digital networks at home and abroad. The U.S. government’s domestic surveillance is legally constrained, especially compared with what authoritarian states do. But this is much less true of private actors. Snowden’s documents gave us a glimpse of the scale of surveillance of our lives by U.S. tech platforms, and made plain how the government accessed privately collected data to serve its national-security needs.
"The second wake-up call was Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. As Barack Obama noted, the most consequential misinformation campaign in modern history was “not particularly sophisticated—this was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.” Russia used a simple phishing attack and a blunt and relatively limited social-media strategy to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2016 election and wreak still-ongoing havoc on the American political system. The episode showed how easily a foreign adversary could exploit the United States’ deep reliance on relatively unregulated digital networks. It also highlighted how legal limitations grounded in the First Amendment (freedom of speech and press) and the Fourth Amendment (privacy) make it hard for the U.S. government to identify, prevent, and respond to malicious"