>we are (used to be?) a country that believes in democracy and the will of our citizens
We either need to mass-educate everyone on the whole Edward Bernays subconscious manipulation thing (which we won't do because it would catastrophically break PR, advertising, political campaigns and more) or do it ourselves, do it thoroughly, and prevent others from accessing our citizens eyes/ears, which is what we're trying to do except for that last part.
We're far, far beyond "we'll just let our well-educated citizens decide for themselves", and it's weird to see someone act like that's how anything works. That idea's been broken for closing in on a century.
>We're far, far beyond "we'll just let our well-educated citizens decide for themselves", and it's weird to see someone act like that's how anything works. That idea's been broken for closing in on a century.
So instead we should let our better-educated governing betters and cultural/business elites decide opinion not just for themselves but for the rest of us? Because of course none of them are subject to any sort of self interest, terrible bias, corruption, mendacity or simply being ignorant due to their own cognitive failures?
The very core notion of democracy and free speech is that no one group can be fully trusted to hold the reins of control or opinion by their own decision and imposition on the rest.
Thus you introduce the largest plurality possible of rights for expression and governance to mitigate against the disasters that much more often occur with oligarchy. Far from perfect but your idea of giving any key group control of discourse for the sake of "fighting misinformation" (as if they themselves don't create shit barges of it of their own) is laughable.
Recall please (for example) that the NY Times, which spent the Trump years and beyond practically raving about the dangers of misinformation and foreign influence of opinions also happily played along with the vastly costly lies of the Iraq WMD scandal that was used to justify an invasion costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. And it did all this lying at the behest of completely domestic U.S. policy makers and leaders.
That's the sort of cozy opinion/policy leadership practices to which we should be pushing further? Fuck no.
We either need to mass-educate everyone on the whole Edward Bernays subconscious manipulation thing (which we won't do because it would catastrophically break PR, advertising, political campaigns and more) or do it ourselves, do it thoroughly, and prevent others from accessing our citizens eyes/ears, which is what we're trying to do except for that last part.
We're far, far beyond "we'll just let our well-educated citizens decide for themselves", and it's weird to see someone act like that's how anything works. That idea's been broken for closing in on a century.