Fostering Debate

The freedom of speech is an important democratic value, but it’s not the only one.  In the liberal tradition, free speech is usually understood as a vehicle — a necessary condition for achieving certain other societal ideals:  for creating a knowledgeable public;  for engendering healthy, rational, and informed debate;  for holding powerful people and institutions accountable;  for keeping communities lively and vibrant.  What we are seeing now is that when free speech is treated as an end and not a means, it is all too possible to thwart and distort everything it is supposed to deliver.
Creating a knowledgeable public requires at least some workable signals that distinguish truth from falsehood.  Fostering a healthy, rational, and informed debate in a mass society requires mechanisms that elevate opposing viewpoints, preferably their best versions.  To be clear, no public sphere has ever fully achieved these ideal conditions — but at least they were ideals to fail from.  Today’s engagement algorithms, by contrast, espouse no ideals about a healthy public sphere.
============ The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech. ============
Some scientists predict that within the next few years, the number of children struggling with obesity will surpass the number struggling with hunger.  Why?  When the human condition was marked by hunger and famine, it made perfect sense to crave condensed calories and salt.  Now we live in a food glut environment, and we have few genetic, cultural, or psychological defenses against this novel threat to our health.  Similarly, we have few defenses against these novel and potent threats to the ideals of democratic speech, even as we drown in more speech than ever.
The stakes here are not low.  In the past, it has taken generations for humans to develop political, cultural, and institutional antibodies to the novelty and upheaval of previous information revolutions.  If The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will came out now, they’d flop;  but both debuted when film was still in its infancy, and their innovative use of the medium helped fuel the mass revival of the Ku Klux Klan and the rise of Nazism.
By this point, we’ve already seen enough to recognize that the core business model underlying the Big Tech platforms — harvesting attention with a massive surveillance infrastructure to allow for targeted, mostly automated advertising at very large scale — is far too compatible with authoritarianism, propaganda, misinformation, and polarization.  The institutional antibodies that humanity has developed to protect against censorship and propaganda thus far — laws, journalistic codes of ethics, independent watchdogs, mass education — all evolved for a world in which choking a few gatekeepers and threatening a few individuals was an effective means to block speech.  They are no longer sufficient.
—    Zeynep Tufekci
From her article:  “It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech“
Appearing in:  Wired Magazine;  dtd:  February 2018
On-line at:  https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/
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On This Day In:
2021	It Doesn’t Rain Forever
	Thoughtful Stroll
2020	An Act Of Faith
	Born And Sold Fairy Tales
2019	Fostering Debate
2018	The Births Of Spring
2017	Drug Epidemic In America
2016	Word Up, Chuck!
2015	Sometimes I Wonder About Things
2014	Still Racing
2013	Anew
2012	Make Both
2011	Are You Happy Yet?

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