I find it fascinating that people defend censoring "misinformation" because people (supposedly) cannot discern it from "real" information.
If we cannot trust the judgement of the common folk, why have a democracy at all?
> If we cannot trust the judgement of the common folk, why have a democracy at all?
I'm afraid that people are looking around, asking themselves that same question, and concluding that democracy has failed.
The problem is that democracy depends on an educated populace and there have been active efforts to dumb people down so that they can be more easily lied to and manipulated. The American people, on average, have the math skills of a 6th grader and their reading skills are worse (https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/). They lack the critical thinking skills to compete with sophisticated disinformation campaigns. The solution requires education, training, and time. Until the population catches up, we're going to continue to see some very bad choices made by voters while scammers and charlatans will continue to be very successful.
I don't blame people for losing some faith in the American people, but I hope we don't lose faith in democracy because clawing it back after we've given up what few freedoms we still have will not be easy. As long as we have democracy we can still make things better.
> I find it fascinating that people defend censoring "misinformation" because people (supposedly) cannot discern it from "real" information. If we cannot trust the judgement of the common folk, why have a democracy at all?
In the early 2010s there was a rash of "pranks" in India where people would forward accusations accusing men pictured with children of pedophilia to rile up mobs to assault and kill them. These accusations were basically always false and done to settle scores, basically as a form of stochastic murder. It was bad enough that WhatsApp had to introduce some UX patterns to slow down forwards of accusations and put warning disclaimers on things forwarded too often. (And I'm sure there were other measures around moderation put in on the back end, including collaboration with state law enforcement entities).
Democracy generally operates through a series of institutions that are held accountable to the public, but doesn't directly fly according to every passing whim of the public.
Short, glib comments get dunked on here, but you've got a point. As the saying goes, “The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” The judgement of the common folk is not unassailable, and is frequently wrong, which is why Democracy needs numerous checks and balances.
Democracy is a hedge against worse outcomes, not a guarantor of future outcomes. You might get your heart’s desires in the service of a King, but he’ll still be King and you’ll now be his subject.
> If we cannot trust the judgement of the common folk, why have a democracy at all?
The fact that people are irrational is why we do not have a direct democracy. Representative democracy, and the existence of constraints in the form of constitution-type documents and term limits, are designed to limit the impact of temporal individual stupidity and crowd stupidity on global outcomes, by constraining the scope of immediate democracy.
> people defend censoring "misinformation" because people (supposedly) cannot discern it from "real" information.
This is overly flippant and strawman-like (conflating government censorship with private company moderation, for example) to what is a massive problem in the age of social media. Vaccine hesitancy, leading to hundreds of thousands of additional dead people, is due to misinformation. There are literal dead people as the end result of this misinformation. Now I for one would prefer that private companies do not censor misinformation, and instead focused on altering the viral dynamics. But this is not a topic to brush under the rug with denialism that misinformation is an actual thing.