The free speech debate about social media is broken

The U.S. Supreme Court is strongly committed to the “marketplace of ideas.” It tends to believe, in the words of Justice Louis Brandeis, that the remedy for falsehoods and fallacies is “more speech, not enforced silence.”

If you believe that, you might also believe that if people lie about Covid-19, the 2020 presidential election, a politician, a journalist, a neighbor — or you or me — nothing can be done. Sure, you can answer with “counterspeech”: the truth. And that’s it.

The problem is in many cases, counterspeech is ineffective. Lies lodge in the human mind. They are like cockroaches: You can’t quite get rid of them.