Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority

The internet has upended this state of affairs: it is the epistemological catastro- phe of our time, locking into place mechanisms that ensure that millions of peo- ple (perhaps hundreds of millions) will have false beliefs about the causal order of nature–about climate change, the effects of vaccines, the role of natural selection in the evolution of species, the biological facts about race–even. [...] John Stuart Mill’s famous example of the speaker inciting an angry mob in front of the corn dealer’s house by declaring that corn dealers starve the poor is the paradigm for this liberal approach: the speaker addressing the mob could be prohibited from the incitement in that context, but he should not be prohibited from publishing that opinion in the newspaper.8 The choices for speech in Mill’s da. [...] Even Marxists, who reject 153 (3) Summer 2024 97 Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority Freud’s view of human nature, can agree that society is always on the verge of “blowing up” precisely because of the exploitation of the labor of many for the benefit of the few. [...] Efforts to suppress communist speech in the United States were based on the belief that the public acceptability of such ideas would increase the likelihood of totalitari- an government.15 The phrase “mental intermediation” does a lot of theoretical work in this part of the opinion. [...] The real issue should be “the likelihood” (to quote the Seventh Circuit) of the harm, and the se- verity of that harm, not whether there is “mental intermediation.” The latter consideration was the real hurdle for the general Dworkin- MacK innon idea, not the fact of “mental intermediation,” whose role they would not have denied: the causal connection between the “speech” and the harm was not very.