All right, QAnon community believes that observable reality is false and the QAnon narrative is real. There is a question as to whether that sort of speech should be abridged or not and quite tellingly we are now more interested in what social media rather than the Supreme Court will decide.
I am interested in the way in which First Amendment rights have descended into the court of popular opinion where it seems true and false are in the eye of the beholder and social media now has the authority to post or take down what those eyes can see. What is involved here is a radical change in mindset — though “mind” seems not at all to be involved here — contextualizing what both speech and authority might be in a cyberspace age.
The climate of First Amendment talk has changed from what it was at any time in the past. The change is foundational. J.S. Mill’s interpretation of free speech was grounded in the belief that falsehoods, whether lies or bullshit, both wittily distinguished by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, if exposed in open, uncensored debate would collapse, fall away defeated like a vanquished adversary.
If repressed or suppressed by censorship, lies and bullshit would fester beneath the cultural surface, as an infection untended. Best to bring every opposing view out in the open, regardless of how it seems that such views offend the norms and value beliefs in sway.
And so our view has always been that falsehood and fake news could not stand firm against…