Response: The Tower of Babel in Ruins

The establishment's obsession with "misinformation" has curdled into a moral panic, one that serves as a convenient pretext for the very thing liberalism is meant to oppose: the suppression of speech by the state. The term itself is elastic and hard to define and has been weaponized to pathologize dissent and expand administrative control over a public square that elites no longer control and therefore no longer trust.

However, to diagnose this solely as a top-down power grab is to miss the deeper corrosion at the heart of our digital commons. The state's clumsy lurch toward censorship is a profoundly illiberal reaction to a genuine societal breakdown which is accelerating at a pace making it difficult to comprehend. The truth is, the public square has already been shattered. The very architecture of our social media platforms, optimized for ephemeral outrage and viral virtue signaling wrapped in vitriol, has made reasoned discourse nearly impossible. These are the ruins of Babel, the platforms themselves structurally reward tribal performance and punish nuanced thought.

The far greater danger is not that the state will censor a specific, inconvenient truth, but that the digital environment has already destroyed the social trust and cognitive capacity necessary for truth to emerge at all. The proposed cure by the out of touch elites involving a centralized priesthood of "fact-checkers" is merely a symptom of the same disease. It is an attempt to impose order on a system designed for chaos, and in its hubris, it only accelerates the collapse of institutional credibility. Being fact-checked has become "almost a badge of honor," a testament to the system's failure.

In this context, bottom-up solutions like "Community Notes" represent more than a simple victory for free expression; they are a small, tentative attempt to rewire the architecture for healthier ends. They shift the incentive from performative outrage to collaborative consensus, a structural fix for a structural problem.

A free society must recognize that it is engaged in a multifront conflict, where narrow focus on one threat leaves it vulnerable to others. The first challenge is political: we must be prepared to oppose any governing power that uses moral panic as a tool to silence opposition. The second is cultural: we must confront that our public square is now an arena designed to foster division and impede rational thought, undermining the foundations of self-government. The ultimate task, therefore, is not simply to protect speech, but to reconstruct the very environment where meaningful speech can exist and flourish.

Response to Cato's recent "Misinformation on Misinformation" discussion between Reason's Robby Soave and Cato's David Inserra. Honestly, I was rolling my eyes at parts, but they made some key points that are worth highlighting:

Censorship is a bipartisan weapon. They pointed out that anyone seeking political advantage will find a reason to censor their opposition. We see it with Florida's Health Department targeting an abortion rights ad as "misinformation" and with a California law aimed at an AI-generated satire of Kamala Harris.

Taxpayer money is used to enforce conformity. A critical insight was how the State Department funded the Global Disinformation Index, a group that then created a blacklist of "risky" outlets, which happened to include the libertarian magazine Reason.

The government uses "jawboning" for quiet coercion. This is the tactic of applying constant, informal pressure on tech companies, which acts as an implicit threat. The best example was Meta's president, Nick Clegg, worrying that if they didn't comply with censorship requests, the "Biden administration is going to screw us on" unrelated trade deals with the EU. That's the coercion happening behind the scenes.

This top-down pressure destroys public trust. They used the COVID-19 lab leak theory as a perfect case study of this backfiring. The government's pressure to suppress the theory "did so much damage to our institutions" once it became plausible, showing how this control actively undermines public trust.

The solution they offered is mandated transparency. They argued that if the government is required to publicly disclose all of its content removal requests, we could all see the difference between a legitimate warning (like a terrorist threat) and purely political pressure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI19V81smvM