> There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good

> There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good at it, for example. West sucks at it (it has Hollywood at least). These regulations aim to help. This is precisely the same argument made by every opponent of free speech throughout history and around the world: bad actors will manipulate the public discourse for their own political ends, disrupting the public order. It's important to realize there is nothing new about this argument at all. The West generally settled for speech over order, and many people would now like to re-negotiate that settlement, using the Internet as justification. Mass media, for a time, created a sort of oasis for "public order" types. Instead of disinformation, gossip, and fake news spread through word-of-mouth - or later, the massively decentralized yellow press - which often led to bizarre political outcomes, riots, violence, and even insurrections and wars, one class of people temporarily/largely controlled a major means of information dissemination via radio and television. Over time it became increasingly centralized in only a few companies, and even allowed for a fairly high degree of government regulation, compared with historic means of information dissemination. I don't know how effective this was in creating actual political consensus, but it gave the impression to people cloistered in the same or similar classes that such consensus existed. The Internet has returned us to the pre-broadcast media norm, and a lot of people really don't like it,because suddenly there's a lot of views, a lot of true information, and a lot of false information they really don't like, and which they are exposed to regularly. So their solution is to use the government and political pressure to reset the Overton window to permit only the range of expression they find personally tolerable, for the sake of public order, which conveniently overlaps with their own political goals. (The good guys, of course, are always for public order, so when we manipulate the public discourse for our own political goals, it's a good thing: the same line of argument pursued in China, the EU, and the US.) > It's the same type of regulation that attempts to prevent a teacher telling kids that the earth is 6 thousand years old. I don't think regulating Twitter is the same as regulating what an agent of the state says in their capacity as an agent of the state.