I see your “The solution to bad speech is more speech” and raise you a “A lie can spread around the world before the truth can get its pants on”. Call or fold?
Call. It's not about who's fastest, it's about who stays in the end. Despite us humans being a lying, cheating bunch, knowledge and access to education continues to grow all over the world. That's certainly not thanks to censorship!
Not so fast, pardner. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
You are making two mistakes here: the simplest one is thinking that the winner of the argument is whoever has the last word. This is very frequently not the case, as any troll could tell you. Often, the power move is to get opponents mad and then move on, leaving them impotently fuming about how terrible that person is.
You're also identifying with the larger group at the societal/species level, which is valid, but is also a way of ignoring problems in the here and now. It's like zooming out from a bloody battlefield to look at the earth in space. With an extraplanetary perspective, Earth looks so beautiful and peaceful...but that doesn't help a single person who is impacted by the bloody battle.
> It's not about who's fastest, it's about who stays in the end
And that's where authoritarian regimes get you. People usually aren't that invested in a conversation, or in disproving firehose of falsehoods style comments placed by people incentivized monetarily to make sure the correct opinion stays in the end. If the platform has rating system they also generate accounts to manipulate it for the same purpose.
>It's not about who's fastest, it's about who stays in the end.
This is contradictory. Not every reader is going to "stay in the end" to learn what's really true. The past few years have given plenty of evidence for that.
How do you define a lie? Please be precise. What source of truth is used to evaluate possible lies, and who gets to make the final determination? What level of confidence is required? Does intent matter? Does a statement count as a lie if it is factually correct, or at least not provably incorrect, but still potentially misleading or lacking relevant context?
Do you also unquestonably accept Putin's, Xi's, Kim's and Erdogan's elections results? What reason do you have to believe that the situations there are different other than what you have been told? I have no reason to believe that Trump won in 2020 but elections are something that inherently requires trust in the institutions running them which makes the result something very much different from an unquestionable fact if that trust is broken.
