If you have to defend democracy by restricting one if it's foundational pillars what are you really defending. I am not arguing the problem of money/power bein

If you have to defend democracy by restricting one if it's foundational pillars what are you really defending. I am not arguing the problem of money/power being used to amplify speech is not real i am arguing that it's something we have to deal with as a part of how real world democracies works when it's not constrained by an Jacobin state where the media have to abide by a very narrow set of standards for what can be reprinted defined by someone who don't really answers to nobody. And it's sure as hell not limited to Russia. Fake news and media manipulation really isn't a new problem, Hearst and Pulitzer used to make their living from soving dissent and and anger, and we call those days the golden age of journalism, we have an multi trillion dollar advertising industry that does nothing but manipulate people into doing things/buying things they might not have done otherwise. Not to mention the circus of day to day politics in pretty much every democratic state. The notion that democracy needed to be protected by a powerful benevolent central committee(with universal authority and no restrictions) is in many way what separated communist from socialists back when the old European empires fell apart, and new systems had to be created, and while the communist states did hold out far better then many democratic socialist states it was not an particularly attractive society for anyone to live in. We live in a world of 6 billion people most of them in a partially shared economy so for the US to have to live with foreign people interfering in us elections is not anti-democratic it's widening the definition of demos to everyone affected by a election, just as the US public itself reserves the right to try and influence foreign elections.