Do you want your country's current political leaders to have more weapons to suppress information they dislike or facts they disagree with? If yes, will you also be happy if your country's opposition leaders gain that power in a few years?
What we're talking about here are legal democratic weapons. The only thing stopping us from using these weapons right now is democratic governance. "The bad people", being unconcerned with democracy, can already use these weapons right now. Trumps unilateral application of tariffs wasn't predestined by some advancement of governmental power by the democrats. He just did it. We don't even know if it was even legal.
Secondly, the people in power are who are spreading this misinformation we are looking at. Information is getting suppressed by the powerful. Namely Google.
Placing limits on democracy in the name of "stopping the bad guys" will usually just curtail the good guys from doing good things, and bad guys doing the bad thing anyway.
They already do and they don’t even have to be powerful.
A conspiracy guy who ran a disqualified campaign for a TN rep seat sued Facebook for defamation for a hallucination saying he took part in the J6 riots. They settled the suit and hired him as an anti-DEI advisor.
(I don’t have proof that hiring him was part of the undisclosed settlement terms but since I’m not braindead I believe it was.)
> A conspiracy guy who ran a disqualified campaign for a TN rep seat sued Facebook for defamation for a hallucination saying he took part in the J6 riots. They settled the suit and hired him as an anti-DEI advisor.
There are already laws against libel and slander. And yes, people like Trump and Musk routinely try to abuse them. They are often unsuccessful. The existence of the laws does not seem to be the relevant factor in whether these attempts to abuse the system succeed.
I'm having a hard time thinking of any winds where I would want it to be acceptable to publish false statements about a person. It doesn't seem there's even any dispute about whether the statements are false. These things can be complicated, but this is not complicated. I'm not feeling a need to rush to the defense of Google for making false statements about some guy.
