Thread by @donmoyn

Hard to move forward when much of one political party's worldview is based on groundless conspiracy theories.

Most Republicans believe Trump won the election, and half of Republicans believe that Antifa were responsible for he attack on the Capitol. washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…

Twice as many Republicans believe the Q-Anon theory that Trump has been battling an imaginary cabal of child traffickers in the Democratic Party than believe that he encouraged his followers to attack the Capitol.

If you believe that "the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away" it is hard to account for the fact that one American political party is now dominated by conspriacism. nytimes.com/2020/11/30/ups…

As a normative goal, the idea that bad ideas are defeated by evidence is admirable. But the last couple of years offer a strong case that the empirical reality is that bad ideas grow with exposure & repetition. This is something that propagandists & psychologists have long known.

As we debate about the limits of speech on social media and elsewhere, one way to frame the question is how willing we are to enable destructive falsehoods (about the nature of democracy, the characteristics of groups, scientific evidence) become platformed and widely believed.

The idea that platforming destructive falsehoods is the quickest way to undermining them seems, at this point, to serve as a comforting myth that allows people who control platforms to avoid thinking about difficult tradeoffs with regard to freedom of speech and its effects.

Sort of gets at the nub of the tradeoff here: we should not feel much confidence in the robustness of our rights in a non-democratic system of government. "I have a free speech right" to end democracy equates to "I have a right to usurp your rights"

https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1359962243048292352?s=20