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Question to americans from a brit. I don't want to start a war here (and if there's 2 things that causes americans to go ranty in a hurry it's guns and free spe

Question to americans from a brit. I don't want to start a war here (and if there's 2 things that causes americans to go ranty in a hurry it's guns and free speech) but free speech has its tradeoffs. In 'free speech' discussions too often things are spoken of in the abstract, so let's be concrete here; this is an example of a deliberate and serious misrepresentation of reality (AKA a lie) that is permitted by free speech. So, is this an acceptable cost? Should you have laws against it? Have I even framed the question correctly? (no descent into shouting matches please).

sieabahlpark 6y ago
We do, they're regulated as publishers. The issue I see is that with the internet it's hard to exactly retract and notify everyone the article has an update. So yes, free speech is still essential as it protects Americans from the government itself imposing its own control over language. We may need to look at different legislative options towards publishers in order to not have this happen, but I'm not sure how you could concretely legislate it in the first place. More importantly though, should we just inherently trust the press or the government in the first place? I think a healthy amount of skepticism for any information we receive in the news needs to be our default response. At least that way no matter what they say you'll have to suspend judgment until you have more info to see if there are retractions. If we keep moving to be a reactive culture we're no better than a cat following a laser pointer off the edge of a bed.