We've already seen how devastating misinformation can be; however, I still tend to err on the side of freedom of speech.
I don't want widespread misinformation, but who gets to decide what that is?
Misinformation can cause people to not get vaccinated or storm the capital building...
As much as we'd like to think people are "deciding" anything, it's simply not the case. They just take what they hear as fact because they believe the source is trustworthy.
No, they take what they hear as fact if they believe the source is trustworthy. So how do we determine which sources are trustworthy? Who decides that? And how are they held accountable when they're wrong?
These are very serious questions which need to be answered before I can support any effort to filter out misinformation.
And to go back to the bomb-on-a-plane comparison, there is one key difference between that and something like election conspiracies. The person who yelled "bomb" is only penalized if they were knowingly wrong - something that's generally pretty easy to prove when it comes to bombs and fires. They aren't prevented from saying "bomb" in the first place and they aren't reprimanded until it's known that they were lying.
I agree, this is exactly my hesitation I pointed out in my original post.
So life is just a harm reduction optimization problem that governments and/or megacorps need to solve? In that case install a king that takes away all freedom in exchange for drastically improved harm reduction.
The potential harm caused by this solution is enormous, but many people are content with it simply because that harm hasn't been realized yet and it makes their lives a little less uncomfortable in the short term. If we're lucky, someone will implement a better solution before this blows up on us.