I think the difference between now and the past is that everyone can exercise their constitutional right to free speech. Free speech used to be somewhat expensive -- by the time you've gone to journalism school and have been hired by someone with a media outlet, you've become the establishment. You want to tell a good story and hold those in power to account, but you know that you have a reputation and you can throw it all away if you don't think carefully about which stories you write and publish. All of this care has made free speech look pretty good and that's it's a must-have for society. (Using your words, to some extent this is "private companies getting to decide what's truthful and what's not"; Facebook doing it is not a whole lot different than the New York Times doing it. The Times doesn't publish every "letter to the editor", and Facebook doesn't have to either.)
What I think is happening now is that free speech is actually free. Thanks to tech companies, there is no cost to getting your ideas out there. The problem is, you have nothing to lose if your reputation is destroyed by poorly-thought-out speech. ("Cancel culture" seems to be the workaround for this, but it doesn't seem very good to me.) The result is that we have decided that we don't actually like this whole freedom thing. But, I think it's actually pretty okay; you have to take the bad with the good (or the very bad with the very good).
We should all be vigilant about calls for regulating speech. It looks like a very good short-term solution, but it won't be a very good long-term solution. To have the best possible society, we need to confront the underlying issues head-on. It's not "fake news" or that people are inflammatory on Facebook. It's that they don't have the educational background to think critically about what they read or hear, and can't actually distinguish a flame designed to manipulate them from writing that is designed to inform them. They are also often so isolated they can't even begin to understand other people's perspectives, and so have no mental model of how to even interpret writing they don't personally understand.
As a society, we have to make sure that we fix this problem. We need every human being to get a great education. We need people to interact with people that look different from them from an early age. It will be expensive, it will be hard, and it will take a long time. But I think looking out 200 years, it's where we want to go, and we should get started right now.
Resist the calls to sweep posts you don't like under the rug, or even to make them illegal. It won't fix any of the underlying problems.
First, I think this is a great comment and worth discussing.
Second, I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that we (entities with the capability and responsibility) should be required to allow something fundamentally dangerous to the nation's integrity to be an amplified message.
The reasoning is that to get to "every human being to get a great education", we need a phenomenal, unified, progressive nation that values education very highly. To get people to willingly interact with people that look different from them, we need a shared belief in the value of diversity. I believe we have evidence that large proportions of the population are readily influenced and manipulated by media, and of course peer-sourced media may have become even more powerful than what was once reputation-based journalism.
Now, I don't think cutting off the amplification of substantially dangerous ideas does fix the underlying problem, but it seems rational to believe it is currently contributing to the problem. It's in the causal chain. To reach the better society you envision, we need the same elements we hope to achieve - great education and humanity and valuing diversity. Basically, it's hoping that the majority of individuals flip a switch and embrace the changes we need, and from there we can continue to propagate the change.
I don't feel like I have the answers, because it's a difficult problem, and I don't believe the trajectory is currently positive. Spreading misinformation is getting easier. Accepting misinformation seems to be growing more prevalent. A once seemingly foregone conclusion of the inevitable ubiquitous acceptance of diversity appears to be tragically stalled. The entities we elected to solve these problems are no longer content to work together in civil discussion and compromise in order to discover and implement potential solutions.
If there's a choice between the band-aid of social media trying to put a finger in the dam to stop the flooding, and an effective remedy to the core problems, I'll gladly choose the remedy, but given the apparent non-existence of such a remedy, I'll begrudgingly accept the band-aid.
What I think is happening now is that free speech is actually free. Thanks to tech companies, there is no cost to getting your ideas out there. The problem is, you have nothing to lose if your reputation is destroyed by poorly-thought-out speech. ("Cancel culture" seems to be the workaround for this, but it doesn't seem very good to me.) The result is that we have decided that we don't actually like this whole freedom thing. But, I think it's actually pretty okay; you have to take the bad with the good (or the very bad with the very good).
We should all be vigilant about calls for regulating speech. It looks like a very good short-term solution, but it won't be a very good long-term solution. To have the best possible society, we need to confront the underlying issues head-on. It's not "fake news" or that people are inflammatory on Facebook. It's that they don't have the educational background to think critically about what they read or hear, and can't actually distinguish a flame designed to manipulate them from writing that is designed to inform them. They are also often so isolated they can't even begin to understand other people's perspectives, and so have no mental model of how to even interpret writing they don't personally understand.
As a society, we have to make sure that we fix this problem. We need every human being to get a great education. We need people to interact with people that look different from them from an early age. It will be expensive, it will be hard, and it will take a long time. But I think looking out 200 years, it's where we want to go, and we should get started right now.
Resist the calls to sweep posts you don't like under the rug, or even to make them illegal. It won't fix any of the underlying problems.