[IBM]

>We are (rightfully) concerned about silencing voices or communities. But our commitment to free expression makes us disproportionately vulnerable in the era of chronic, perpetual information war. Digital combatants know that once speech goes up, we are loathe to moderate it; to retain this asymmetric advantage, they push an all-or-nothing absolutist narrative that moderation is censorship, that spammy distribution tactics and algorithmic amplification are somehow part of the right to free speech.

>We seriously entertain conversations about whether or not bots have the right to free speech, privilege the privacy of fake people, and have Congressional hearings to assuage the wounded egos of YouTube personalities. More authoritarian regimes, by contrast, would simply turn off the internet. An admirable commitment to the principle of free speech in peace time turns into a sucker position against adversarial psy-ops in wartime. We need an understanding of free speech that is hardened against the environment of a continuous warm war on a broken information ecosystem. We need to defend the fundamental value from itself becoming a prop in a malign narrative.

This is key and why Europe is in a much better position to actually deal with this, specifically Germany. The German constitution expressly allows the state to defend liberal democracy with illiberal policies [1]. Germany doesn't need to deal with abstract and academic debates over free speech because they had more pressing concerns, like how to denazify the country and prevent history from repeating.

Sidenote: it's super annoying that all my comments are automatically dead. If @dang or anyone else can tell me what the heck is going on I'd appreciate it (no one has replied to my emails to [e-mail]).

[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/renaissance-militant-democracy