[LeafItAlone]

>The best disinfectant is sunlight.

Is it? How does that work at scale?

Speech generally hasn’t been restricted broadly. The same concepts and ideas removed from YouTube still were available on many places (including here).

Yet we still have so many people believing falsehoods and outright lies. Even on this very topic of COVID, both sides present their “evidence” and and truly believe they are right, no matter what the other person says.

[TeeMassive]

What's your alternative? The opposite is state dictated censorship and secrecy and those have turned very wrong every single time.

[LeafItAlone]

I honestly don’t know. My libertarian foundation want me to believe that any and all ideas should be able to be spread. But with the technological and societal changes in the past 10-15 years, we’ve seen how much of a danger this can be too. A lie or mistrust can be spread faster than ever to a wider audience than previously ever possible. I don’t have solution, but what we have not is clearly not working.

[api]

The root problem is that people don’t trust authorities. Why? Because they burned that trust.

People don’t believe the scientific consensus on vaccines because there were no WMDs in Iraq, to give one of many huge examples.

“But those were different experts!”

No they weren’t. Not to the average person. They were “the authorities,” and “the authorities” lied us into a trillion dollar war. Why should anyone trust “the authorities” now?

Tangentially… as bad as I think Trump is, he’s still not as bad as George W Bush in terms of lasting damage done. Bush II was easily the worst president of the last 100 years, or maybe longer. He is why we have a president Trump.