You're using bad analogy to promote a bullshit idea of speech control for the sake of the "common good". The problem with your idea is that unlike environmental

You're using bad analogy to promote a bullshit idea of speech control for the sake of the "common good". The problem with your idea is that unlike environmental pollution in which real, physical spaces are damaged or destroyed by measurable physical contaminants, intellectual "pollution" is extremely subjective. It's subject to the biases of those who decide what is and isn't disinformation and its subject to changes in these biases over time. The damage it does is also hard to measure, especially when weighed against the damage caused by giving anyone or group of people the authority to decide what others can say and believe. It's easy to apply such ideas to obviously stupid conspiracy theories and fringe claims, but it's also very easy to start spreading the scope of what gets claimed as disinformation over time. We could look at the entire pandemic as just one very evident example of these tendencies happening. We can also look at a number of authoritarian countries that have taken advantage of the western media obsession with "misinformation/disinformation" of the last few years and used it as a cover for passing their own clearly authoritarian speech-repressing laws in the name of "fighting misinformation". Freer countries are also never immune to going down the same road, their governments DO NOT need more tools for making it easier. Truly bad information and grossly ignorant opinions are not only not anything new in all of human history, they are if anything today less extreme and less common than they've ever been. The proliferation of better thinking has moved best in exactly those countries where free speech has been best protected. It's in places where it has been repressed that the opposite tends to happen more easily. It's sad to me that educated, intelligent people can use sophistry to try building moats around their personal biases in defense of speech controls and then claim that they're working towards the protection of people's minds, or any sort of common good. History has shown that such attempts at controlling speech almost invariably produce the opposite and that giving power over speech to any authority does so especially. Grotesque.