I used to believe that the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Now that seems archaic. Just as the founders never envisioned how the right of a well-regulated militia to own slow-loading muskets could apply to mass murderers with bullet-spewing military-style semi-automatic rifles, they could not have foreseen speech so twisted to malevolent intent as it is now.
Cyber-libertarianism, the ethos of the internet with roots in 18th century debate about the free market of ideas, has failed us miserably. Well after the pandemic is over, the infodemic will rage on – so long as it pays to lie, distort and misinform.
Just recently, we saw the malignancies of our premier freedoms on display in the mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado. At the center of the horror was a deeply disturbed man with a gun created for war, with the capacity to kill large numbers of humans, quickly. Within hours of the slaughter at the supermarket, a Facebook account with about 60,000 followers wrote that the shooting was fake – a so-called false flag, meant to cast blame on the wrong person.
So it goes. Toxic misinformation is just something we’re supposed to live with in a free society. But there are three things we could do now to clean up the river of falsities poisoning our democracy.
First, teach your parents well. Facebook users over the age of 65 are far more likely to post articles from fake news sites than people under the age of 30, according to multiple studies.