To me it stems from a basic central problem: verifiable fact has value, but it is not defended by our institutions meaningfully. You can spread all the harmful

To me it stems from a basic central problem: verifiable fact has value, but it is not defended by our institutions meaningfully. You can spread all the harmful lies you like as long as your victims are diffuse and lack the standing for a lawsuit. We have plenty of forms of censorship available through the courts - people can be punished for perjury, filing a false report, defamation, false advertising, fraud, uttering threats, etc. But in all those cases, you only face punishment if you target somebody with the standing and means to retain a lawyer, or you target the machinery of justice itself. What happens when you target something like "climate change"? Or vaccines? Or the history of the 2020 election? Nothing. Nobody has standing to sue so the act is not punished. So why is Hulk Hogan more worthy of protection from harmful speech than Climate Change? And letting falsehoods go uncorrected plainly hasn't worked. The "Marketplace of Ideas" has done jack squat about Q or climate change denial or antivaxxers or whatever, and now we're facing real catastrophic impact of those problems. Significant thought-leaders in these communities can be caught over and over again in easily-verifiable lies and supporting extremist and hateful content... and face no consequences in terms of losing support through the normal mechanisms of the platform. You can see what happens to platforms without substantive moderation or censorship - they're gradually consumed by obsessed extremists who simply exhaust all the normal people until they leave. So, with the total failure of a government policy to tackle the problem, is it any wonder that people are looking to the owners of the platforms to tackle the issue? They have the means, and can be influenced through threats of boycotts. Until reality itself can sue for defamation, we have to come up with a decent alternative. The stakes are high and the impact is real.