Oh, I'm very interested in being satisfied, but I think the problem is way harder than people assume it is.
We had the luxury, for decades, of a de-facto mechanism of tamping the noise in the SNR culturally: the press was free, but only some people could afford it (and, at least over the airwaves, the press wasn't even technically free, as the AM / FM bands were considered shared natural resources that were parceled up by the FCC; break their rules, and your privilege of throwing signal through America's finite bandwidth was curtailed by law).
This is no longer the case. The modern, dominant, massively-distributed, massively-parallel peer-to-peer communications media doesn't follow any of those old rules. IP addresses are a constrained resource, but not enough to actually care. Anyone who can get a peering agreement with an internet carrier can communicate. As a result, we are freer than ever to speak our minds to every corner of the Earth at near lightspeed... But a lot of old assumptions that were implicitly baked into the question of how mass communication technology was used no longer apply.
It is not guaranteed that democratic society survives in this new normal. That is the interesting question. So when people assert, unexplored, that you just "inform" people by "adding signal," it's worth raising the question of how that signal cuts through the noise. In the old days, it'd cut through because various broadcast comms organs, from NBC down to individual stations, refused to carry the noise (either by their own standards or by implicit threat of loss of broadcast license). What makes it cut through now? It isn't whether it's true (we have observed how easily people can be deceived if someone spends enough money to culture-jam them with an alternate narrative of reality). It isn't whether it's important (we've observed people turn to triviality to disengage from painful reality going on outside their window).
We should think hard about these aspects of the new normal.
> are those risks worth being free
I don't think freedom is guaranteed by maximizing everyone's ability to speak at all times, unfettered, to everyone. Trivially, you could assert the one kind of freedom (the freedom to say anything, at any time, unfettered, to anyone)... But if nobody's listening, if you're just screaming into the void, what is the value of that freedom? And what if that freedom is used to deprive you of other freedoms? That freedom can be used by the wealthy and connected to craft narrative that says people like you and me don't deserve to be treated as equal members of society (and, more importantly, say it loudly enough and often enough to drown out counter-narratives by simple weight and the finite nature of human attention... Unfettered freedom of speech means a billionaire can buy up every billboard and ad slot in your town to push the narrative that you belong in jail). Do we just trust that some cosmic justice undermines that narrative? And if it doesn't, what happens to all our freedoms?
And I bet you believe you're the first person to ever claim literal democracy will fall if you don't do it the way you want.
Since time immemorial people have wanted to control others and the primary way of doing so is violence and speech. This has ALWAYS been the case.
This is nothing more than yet another person wanting to control other people. Whoopdeedoo, welcome to the human condition.
What makes the US so unique is that its laws were put into place by those WHO WERE CONTROLLED and thus it was important to them that the usual mechanisms for control were subverted, hence free speech.
And it took a mere 200+ years, a blink of an eye, for society to transform to the point that the debates are now discussing doing away with free speech to better control the information people have access to.
Because ... you know ... literal democracy will fall if we don't give access to control mechanisms to control information that people can see. We'll paper over that democracy has become the strongest super power in the world with those very same tenets in place.
There is extreme danger in relying solely on the assertion "Things have ben fine in past times; this is a time, therefore things will be fine." Stable systems are stable until they aren't, and when they aren't the shift to a new stable arrangement tends to be extreme.
> What makes the US so unique is that its laws were put into place by those WHO WERE CONTROLLED
Americans (and I'm including myself here) tend to have a belief in exceptionalism that isn't well-grounded in their own history.
The first thing the Continental Army did after overthrowing the existing power structure was march on western Pennsylvania to put down a tax rebellion. We definitely traded one structure of large-scale control for another. And the nation that came out of that war, while "no longer controlled," still practiced slavery, a practice that was only ended by a second violent upheaval (resulting in a government far more federalized, i.e. centralized, than the one that it replaced... America had tried the experiment of state-level government self-determination and found it extremely wanting).
The United States is, depending on how you slice the concept, two major political-philosophical upheavals away from its roots (the Civil War and the New Deal). We are the same country in terms of continuity but not stasis. A 1776-era revolutionary wouldn't have recognized the America of 1960, let alone today.
> We'll paper over that democracy has become the strongest super power in the world with those very same tenets in place.
Hard disagree, because as I explained, freedom of the press was previously implicitly curtailed by cost of press, exclusivity, and limited reach. Speech was implicitly constrained in the past in ways it no longer is.
This new paradigm is new. It remains to be seen how democracy survives boiling in this pot. It may very well survive! I have not seen a strong argument that doesn't appeal to the past that the survival is likely, let alone guaranteed, and appeals to the past don't work because the Internet is a discontinuity; we have not communicated with each other in this way before.
(... additionally, while the largest superpower is a democracy, the second-largest is an authoritarian one-party socialist-communist republic, so I don't think we can cleanly assert democracy gives automatic supremacy here. I happen to enjoy living under one, personally. I think it has a lot of advantages. Certainly feels good. It's hard to assert it's the only true and virtuous way to be when 18% of the global population might disagree with me.)
My perception is I'm observing extreme changes and hoping democracy does not fail. I grasp for reassurance and all people seem able to give me is "Well, it hasn't failed so far," which is the way people talked about housing prices before the crash.
This is the same kind of sentiment that nobility and clergy had when the printing press was invented. Society as a whole, and democracy, will be fine. The privileged status that several people enjoy in society today will not be fine. In a few places in Europe, the upheaval was bloody because the nobility and the clergy turned to violent means to keep their power.
I am guessing, since we are on HN and you hold this set of views, that you, like me, are part of the modern "clergy" class. Most of HN is, as well as much of silicon valley. The discourse has so far been controlled to your benefit by people who are your peers, and you are looking at the uncertain future of your own status and thinking that the entirety of democracy is falling. The reality is that our position as arbiters of speech is a distortion of the democratic system, and the immune system of democracy, speech, is coming to fix that.
This distortion affects your definition of "signal" and "noise." It is a lot easier for us to see things that benefit the cathedral as signal, and things that don't as noise.
Most people can tell the signal from the noise just fine. The problem is that for tech folks, the signal we want them to receive isn't always the signal that they want to receive. It often isn't noise or disinformation, just signal that is inconvenient for us.
If you look at provably false conspiracy theories (eg flat earth or chemtrails) and cults, there are very few people who believe them despite the noise level they put out and the amount that YouTube promotes them. In comparison, something like 70% people believe one or two conspiracy theories that are hard to disprove (eg things about the JFK assassination, aliens, or the CIA). It turns out that this is mostly harmless - the worst that happens is that it leads to distrust of government, which happens to have earned a lot of distrust.
If you look at other inconvenient things that big tech has suppressed, like the news about Hunter Biden's laptop, you will find that this is important signal that may have swung the election, not misinformation. The problem is that it would have swung the election the wrong way, so the cathedral (in this case, the FBI, Google, Facebook, and Twitter) kept it off the modern airwaves, proclaiming it to be "noise." Unfortunately, this was signal for most people - a later survey said that a decent fraction of Biden voters would have voted differently if they had known about it - and our collective filters caught it because it was inconvenient for us.
People are not bad critical thinkers: they can figure out what is relevant signal for them. After getting out of school, they understand how to think critically well enough to find the information that is relevant and not false. It just isn't leading them to the information that we think should be relevant to them.
Democracy is fine. In fact, it may be healthier when the censorship regime that we have collectively imposed is gone. The control we have over it is going away, and that is a good thing.
> The reality is that our position as arbiters of speech is a distortion of the democratic system, and the immune system of democracy, speech, is coming to fix that.
I don't know how to square that view with the observation that in the United States, an attack on Congress was perpetrated as a direct result of a runaway lie regarding the integrity of the election process. That's not free speech protecting democracy; that's a mob riled up by unchecked lies directly, physically attacking the mechanisms of their representative democracy.
Believe me, if I was observing free speech bringing truth to power and undermining, for example, the lobbying infrastructure, or the massive consolidation of power in megacorporations, I'd be thrilled. The cathedral needs to be corrected if not taken down. But that's not what I'm seeing. I think I'm mostly observing the rich and powerful using their ability to buy content on the various free channels of speech to rile mobs with lies. They're trying to cut the structural constraints on their piece of the cathedral and turn it into, if you will, a High Tower.
I'm not thinking about Biden's laptop; I agree with your assessment of that. The amplification of lies about the structure of US elections threatens to undermine the democratic process, and if it crumbles now it's most likely to be replaced with a fascist autocracy.
This does not invalidate their point.
What you're pointing out are risks, are those risks worth being free?
Most people would say yes.