For inciting violence. Sure. Free speech isn’t absolute.

But along with fringe Covid ideas, we limited actual speech on legitimate areas of public discourse around Covid. Like school reopening or questioning masks and social distancing.

We needed those debates. Because the unchecked “trust the experts” makes the experts dumber. The experts need to respond to challenges.

(And I believe those experts actually did about as best they could given the circumstances)

Try to post a meme here, see how long it stays up.

More seriously, it's just not this simple man. I know people really want it to be, but it's not.

I watched my dad get sucked down a rabbit hole of qanon, Alex Jones, anti-vax nonsense and God knows what other conspiracy theories. I showed him point blank evidence that qanon was bullshit, and he just flat out refuses to believe it. He's representative of a not insignificant part of the population. And you can say it doesn't do any damage, but those people vote, and I think we can see clearly it's done serious damage.

When bonkers ass fringe nonsense with no basis in reality gets platformed, and people end up in that echo chamber, it does significant damage to the public discourse. And a lot of it is geared specifically to funnel people in.

In more mainstream media climate change is a perfect example. The overwhelming majority in the scientific community has known for a long time it's an issue. There were disagreement over cause or severity, but not that it was a problem. The media elevated dissenting opinions and gave the impression that it was somehow an even split. That the people who disagree with climate change were as numerous and as well informed, which they most certainly weren't, not by a long shot. And that's done irreparable damage to society.

Obviously these are very fine lines to be walked, but even throughout US history, a country where free speech is probably more valued than anywhere else on the planet, we have accepted certain limitations for the public good.

If I were trying to govern during a generational, world stopping epoch event, I would also not waste time picking through the trash to hear opinions.

I would put my trust in the people I knew were trained for this and adjust from there.

I suspect many of these opinions are born from hindsight.

Really, discussion was limited? Or blatant lies were rightly excluded from discourse?

There's a big difference, and in any healthy public discourse there are severe reputations penalties for lies.

If school reopening couldn't be discussed, could you point to that?

It's very odd how as time goes on my recollection differs so much from others, and I'm not sure if it's because of actual different experiences or because of the fog of memory.

> We needed those debates. Because the unchecked “trust the experts” makes the experts dumber. The experts need to respond to challenges.

We've had these debates for decades. The end result is stuff like Florida removing all vaccine mandates. You can't debate a conspiracy or illogical thinking into to going away, you can only debate it into validity.

The "debate" ended up doing nothing but spreading misinformation.

Society as a whole has a responsibility to not do that kind of shit. We shouldn't be encouraging the spread of lies.