I actually agree with U.S. President Barack Obama's April 7, 2022 interview in The Atlantic, on the basic threat of disinformation; I think it has a lot more to do with the addictive mechanism designed into social media.
This is called 'game loop theory', and it's relatively novel - about as old as addictive social video game design is, and that's about a decade old as a discipline.
So it's understandable if decision-makers are still a little vague on how it works precisely.
I'd respectfully disagree with where Obama stands on First Amendment protections however. In an ideal world, more free speech is the answer to "bad" free speech, yes. In a world of variable speech privileges, human beings with inescapable perceptual bias, and AI systems that enshrine those biases and mask them in machine data, that doesn't work.
I don't think that "more free speech" works on problem cases.
So, someone just tipped me off on Friday about a registered sex offender on Facebook with more than 40 different fake profiles they appear to have used, making them a serial violator of laws requiring registration of social media profiles by RSOs; I’m not sure how to route it yet, but it does look like it’s a real thing that is happening. I don't think 'more free speech' works there.
Similarly, I was just looking at the fascist scene in France relative to its election coming up. A lot of the hard-right in France, as in the rest of Europe, is anti-NATO, which makes them effectively pro-Russian. It is frustratingly difficult to trace any kind of actual financial connection in most cases, but it just looks shady as heck a lot of the time when you ask "where is the far-right in Europe getting their money from?" I don't know that a "free speech absolutist" approach works there.
Or there's the literal neo-Nazis on Facebook I was hunting, or the disinformation farms that push low-quality right-wing content at high volume that I've followed since 2017 - some of you remember what it was like when I was posting 40-50 screenshots at a time of right-wing disinformation.
Again, I don't know that free speech is the answer there.
Or how about the YouTube channel inside Kharkiv that was transmitting data on Ukrainian military equipment locations in public, the day before Kharkiv was bombarded by Russians whom - as Zelensky himself said - "knew where to target". What kind of free speech solution is there for that? I don't think there is one.
As ugly as it is to advocate for restriction of speech privileges, even against abstract entities composed of spam rings and low-quality "trash news" pages, there are real harms that accrue without such restrictions. Entrenchment, ideological inculcation, disinformation and outright harm that emerge from untrammeled free speech exploiting a social video game - that is, again, what every successful social network is - strike me as too profound to allow unchecked and unabated.
When we do that, we get 2016 in America, and then we get the insane daily "what did he Tweet now?!" turmoil of 2016-2020 in America, and then we get the almost permanently fractured America of 2021-2022 as a result.
Disinformation hacks democracy by subverting reality itself. This should be a learned lesson for us by now.
And when we talk about regulation and the debate around Section 230 of the Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, like Obama does, almost seamlessly shifting from declaring himself an "absolutist" on the First Amendment to talking about how to regulate speech… we're really talking about regulation on how we address problem cases, as increasingly commonplace as they are.
Indeed, to the extent that social networks "editing" and selectively removing content is a form of their own free speech, that means, at its most basic level, we still end up applying speech restrictions and regulation (on social networks, but, still). At its most concise, the solutions we're talking about have to do with enforcement, more than new laws.
But we're also talking about a much broader strategic question, which is, shall we continue to allow unchecked influence operations to be run on Americans, by Americans and by others, taking advantage of American social networks to do so?
By now I think we should know better.