> We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is.
This is contradictory.
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
Maybe something like, you can't force someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don't want to? Or maybe letting people sue anyone who spreads damaging lies about them?
It isn't in the parallel they are drawing - right now you have free permission to visit public property and forests and national parks but you still can't cause harm to others or the property (set fires). So while there is personal freedom, it is not at the cost of other people's freedom.
As to your second point, what about social networks not showing content that they believe to be objectionable. Does that count as “not forcing someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don’t want to?”
"Contradictory" presumes that a given property is Boolean and thus if it isn't one value, it must be the other.
Very few useful properties outside of the artificial worlds of logic and computing are Boolean. Most properties we are trying to design systems for out in the real world continuously varying and often multi-dimensional.
That's why optimizing them requires difficult trade-offs.
I think disinformation is not as a significant problem as it is often made out to be. It would not need immediate attention. It is the individual decision of some people to listen to it. Many of them know better, but they have a conflict with those that want to set themselves up to discern truth and wrong.
Especially with topics like the pandemic I see no authority that could help here and maybe that isn't so bad in the grand scheme of things.
This is contradictory.
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
Maybe something like, you can't force someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don't want to? Or maybe letting people sue anyone who spreads damaging lies about them?