Should-Read: Absolutely brilliant from Henry Farrell. If being muted by Jonathan Chait were to regularly produce such good thought, Chait should mute everybody immediately!: Henry Farrell: We’re all going to need safe spaces: "Speech doesn’t scale, and at a certain point, the scarce resource isn’t speech but attention...
...Even when people who want to argue with you are entirely sincere, there is a point at which you simply can’t pay attention to everyone who wants to talk at you on Twitter and still function. You need to make choices. Second, speech is increasingly being weaponized to drown out inconvenient voices... making online political conversation more or less impossible in authoritarian regimes... tendentious, irrelevant, and angry comments... a “flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space” (in passing, I used to be very strongly in favor of anonymous free speech on the Internet; I’ve had to seriously rethink that). In the standard shibboleth, the best antidote to bad speech is more speech. What Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China have discovered is that the best antidote to more speech is bad speech. And while there is a lot of paranoia about Russian bots, there was, I think, a very real attempt to use these techniques to stir things up in the US election, and in Western European countries too...
