Library science professor Zeynep Tufekci, Wired, January 16, 2018, sounds a warning that free speech is now “treated as an end not a means” making it too easy “to thwart and distort everything it is supposed to deliver.” Tufekci writes, “By this point, we’ve already seen enough to recognize that the core business model underlying the Big Tech platforms—harvesting attention with a massive surveillance infrastructure to allow for targeted, mostly automated advertising at very large scale—is far too compatible with authoritarianism, propaganda, misinformation, and polarization. The institutional antibodies that humanity has developed to protect against censorship and propaganda thus far—laws, journalistic codes of ethics, independent watchdogs, mass education—all evolved for a world in which choking a few gatekeepers and threatening a few individuals was an effective means to block speech. They are no longer sufficient.”
Brian Doherty of Reason, February 13, 2018, differs with Tufekci and quotes John Stuart Mill in criticizing his narrow focus on the truth, “Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.” Doherty writes, “The search for truth has a value larger than merely getting people to believe what’s true.” And Doherty cites Jonathan Rauch who argued that gay rights gained acceptance with allowing people to legally express their bigotry, hatred and bogus ideas about homosexuality.