> It is on each individual to inform themselves, and to decide what to believe and what to disregard.
That's where the conundrum lies, requiring individual responsibility for protecting a whole society of potential bad actors using this freedom to break society apart.
How is it solved? No one knows, what we know is that relying on individuals to each act on their own to solve it won't work, it never works, we also see the effects on society from the loss of any social cohesion around what "truth" is, even though before the age of Internet and social media there were vehicles to spread lies, and manipulate people, this has been supercharged in every way: speed of spread, number of influential voices, followings, etc.
Anything that worked before probably doesn't work now, we don't know how to proceed but using platitudes from before these times is also a way to cover our eyes to what is actually happening: fractures in society becoming larger rifts, supercharged by new technologies, being wielded as a weapon.
I don't think government censorship is the answer, nor I think that just letting it be and requiring every single person to be responsible in how they critically analyse the insurmountable amount of information we are exposed to every day is the answer either.
It is solved by a democratic system that defines truth as "mutually observable phenomena", defines good as "the wishes of the people", and allows individuals to engage in free dialogue as a replacement for violence.
Good outnumbers bad, so the good will win, unless both sides think they're good in a 50/50 split.
This can happen even in that ideal society, because 50% of the individuals will eventually decide to have fundamentally different goals as the other 50%. In which case, I don't think we should hold that society together by force, but rather provide a mechanism for it to peacefully split into two, precisely to uphold the democratic principle of respecting the wishes of every individual.
Suppose half of those people are mistaken in a collective delusion, and their goals are in actuality aligned with the other half, but the other half have just failed so spectacularly at enlightening them (or perhaps the delusional half are so spectacularly delusional that they're impossible to enlighten). In this rare case of a perfect failure, they will quickly realize after the split and want to get back together, because reality is a harsh judge, and its judgements are ultimate.
That's where the conundrum lies, requiring individual responsibility for protecting a whole society of potential bad actors using this freedom to break society apart.
How is it solved? No one knows, what we know is that relying on individuals to each act on their own to solve it won't work, it never works, we also see the effects on society from the loss of any social cohesion around what "truth" is, even though before the age of Internet and social media there were vehicles to spread lies, and manipulate people, this has been supercharged in every way: speed of spread, number of influential voices, followings, etc.
Anything that worked before probably doesn't work now, we don't know how to proceed but using platitudes from before these times is also a way to cover our eyes to what is actually happening: fractures in society becoming larger rifts, supercharged by new technologies, being wielded as a weapon.
I don't think government censorship is the answer, nor I think that just letting it be and requiring every single person to be responsible in how they critically analyse the insurmountable amount of information we are exposed to every day is the answer either.