> People need to adapt to not believing every stupid thing they read on the internet and actually thinking critically about things.
Sure, free speech is optimal if this happens. But what if it doesn't happen? People are extremely irrational [0], and that certainly won't change anytime soon. What changed is that we got better at exploiting that irrationality at scale.
There's no practical value in stating "in an ideal world, free speech is the solution". We don't live in that world, and we don't get any closer to it by complaining on HN about people not doing enough critical thinking.
This assumes there are no negative externalities to the curtailing of free speech, which is laughably untrue. People now are no less rational than they have been the past few centuries when free speech was allowed to prosper unmolested. And they are no less grasping and unscrupulous when it comes to the reasons unbridled free speech was held up as an exemplar to begin with. The fact that the result of all this censorship and narrative massaging has indisputably been the pushing of harmful agendas is illustrative of the above.
No one is saying "in an ideal world" that's a strawman.
Fact checkers, corporations, the media, the state, and any of the elite are just people and so extremely irrational, Why on earth would you want to give any of them power above and beyond the general public, it's so easy to manipulate the so called "rational" with selective publication of information. Do we just forget that covid human to human spreading was "fake news" for an entire month, and basically changed the course of history because some bureaucracy decided it had more authority on the matter than a doctor treating the patients.
Or what about the "Ricard Spencer is a nice guy in Germany" effect, because people in Europe can't see the hate speech he makes, so they think he's fairly reasonable person.
To me it seems that it's the general public, from Snowden to Li Wenliang that is keeping fake news in check, not the elite, keeping the public in check.
Sure, free speech is optimal if this happens. But what if it doesn't happen? People are extremely irrational [0], and that certainly won't change anytime soon. What changed is that we got better at exploiting that irrationality at scale.
There's no practical value in stating "in an ideal world, free speech is the solution". We don't live in that world, and we don't get any closer to it by complaining on HN about people not doing enough critical thinking.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases