THE PROPER RESPONSE TO DISINFORMATION OR MISINFORMATION IS INFORMATION.

I'm old enough to remember advocates of "liberating tolerance" complaining that freedom of the press was limited to those who owned one.  The political economy of that argument, loosely, was that people who had the means to own a printing press had enough of a stake in the existing order of things to foreclose people with serious reservations about the existing order of things from calling attention.

From there it was not much of a stretch to come up with the notion of "repressive tolerance," meaning people who enjoyed freedom of expression and had positive things to say about the existing order of things were stifling that socially necessary calling of attention.

Marcuse’s 1965 essay, titled “Repressive Tolerance” was considered “an attack on the ideal of free speech.”   It also was viewed “by many in the New Left as a rationale for interrupting or refusing discussion and debate.”

He vigorously urged both the negation of conservative arguments from the public square along with acceptance of Leftwing arguments as gospel. In his own words, he supported, “Intolerance against movements from the Right, and tolerance of movements from the Left.”

The Marxist theorist further claimed that conservative and even “bourgeoise” or middle-class ideas constituted what he called “false consciousness” about the true nature of society.

He wrote, “false consciousness…must begin with stopping the words and images which fed this consciousness.  To be sure, this is censorship, even pre-censorship,” he concluded. Imagine that he urged not only censorship, but pre-censorship.

Marcuse added in a 1968 postscript that the idea of “tolerance” of opposing views must be denounced, even if it’s promoted by liberals.  “Under the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot, fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy.”

"Repressive Tolerance," in the manner of many academic works, particularly of the genus "written by Germans" and the species "abstract political philosophy" is not an easy read, and even careful readers disagree on what it means.  A recent academic attempt to clarify its arguments offers, in the abstract, a passage that might offer more clarity if rendered in German.

Marcuse’s defense of dissent, however, appeals to a critique of pure tolerance that exposes the unavoidably partisan practice of tolerance, which invariably favors the reigning undemocratic status quo. The choice whether to tolerate in a manner that discriminates in favor of opinions and actions that are likely to advance the democratic conditions essential to a more just and epistemically sound exercise of toleration or to discriminate in favor of those that hinder them ---a distinction, as Marcuse sees it, that corresponds to the distinction between the Left and the Right---is dictated by reason itself, whose exercise depends on toleration. Because toleration must discriminate in the absence of full reason, its fallible exercise in favor of reason and democracy must proceed cautiously, not by suppressing voices on the Right so much as selectively encouraging those on the Left. I conclude that because this equation of impartial reason with a partisan view of society is unavoidable regardless of one’s political sympathies accusing Marcuse of being elitist and hypocritical is itself hypocritical.

I'm not sure what this "reigning undemocratic status quo" is, but that might be my own disposition to treat practices of long standing as perhaps conferring evolutionary advantage on their adopters.  Whether that's putting a finger on the scale in favor of arguments from the Right I leave as an exercise.  It's the role of reason that might be more important in the discussion.  And here, extracting  another passage from "Repressive Tolerance," Professor Marcuse sounds positively positivist.  “Tolerance of free speech is the way of improvement, of progress in liberation, not because there is no objective truth, and improvement must necessarily be a compromise between a variety of opinions, but because there is an objective truth which can be discovered, ascertained only in learning and comprehending that which is and that which can be and ought to be done for the sake of improving the lot of mankind.”

Now-a-days, information technologies provide everyone a platform, and "liberating tolerance" means limiting who can use one.

His continuation, “Universal toleration becomes questionable when its rationale no longer prevails, when tolerance is administered to manipulated and indoctrinated individuals who parrot, as their own, the opinion of their masters, for whom heteronomy has become autonomy,” might be the basis for recent efforts, not always by people on the left, precisely to limit who gets a social media platform.  That stance is politically popular.  "Most Americans favor restrictions on false information, violent content online."  Well, we once had bourgeois norms about what wasn't suitable for mixed company.  You deconstruct norms at your peril.

Next comes the Secretary-General of the United Nations, making an argument that Pope Linus no doubt would have endorsed.

In another display of "we're no longer trying to hide it," on Tuesday, the leftists at the United Nations called on governments around the world to curb what they deem to be "hate speech" and "disinformation" from online sources. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the world's governments to “rein in hate speech and disinformation spreading online” through what he described as a "global censorship framework." Guterres stated that "unchecked digital platforms" -- translation, platforms we don't like -- were stoking "the worst impulses of humanity," translation, saying things we don't like. Guterres claims the alleged hate speech and disinformation "threatens global stability and world peace."

Not surprisingly, Team Red State is having none of it.  On the other hand, resident establishmentarian Ross Douthat would either like a little more restraint, or perhaps a restoration of bourgeois norms.

While many people voted against Trump because they felt that liberalism or democracy was under threat, many other people moved rightward for the same reason — because they felt that was the way to defend liberal norms against the speech police, or democratic power against control by technocratic elites.

We don’t know which perspective, if either, will be vindicated. All we know is that right now our core political categories are contested — with vigorous disagreement about what both democracy and liberalism mean, unstable realignments on both the left and the right, and “post-liberal” elements at work in right-wing populism and woke progressivism and managerial technocracy alike.

All this indicates the first way that we are not going back: We are not returning to the narrowing of political debate that characterized the world after 1989, the converging worldviews of the Reaganite center-right and the Clinton-Blairite center-left, the ruling-out of radical and reactionary possibilities.

This narrowing suggested a sense that the desired end state of politics was a world where two like-minded political parties debated budgeting and not much else, where culture wars were settled on whatever terms the liberal professional class deemed suitable and where ideology retreated to academic monasteries and religion to the private sphere.

Well, no, the theses have been nailed to the cathedral door, and redemption by faith emergence supplants redemption by the purchase of indulgences Ivy League degrees.  Mr Douthat might not like it, but he's pragmatic enough to see it happening.

That’s because we are also not going back to a world where there is a set of trusted truth-mediating institutions, core sources of news and information that everyone recognizes and trusts, a “mainstream” of argument and opinion-shaping that sets the parameters of debate.

The decline of the mainstream has been evident since the internet began its disruptive work, but for a while it appeared that digital life might bring some kind of establishment consensus back around — because if there were just a few big tech companies responsible for stewarding most of online interaction, and they all shared a certain set of values, then a kind of new establishment could be regulated or willed into existence, with Google and Twitter and Facebook taking the place of CBS and ABC and NBC.

This was the hope of some “anti-disinformation” liberals and a source of anxiety for many populists and libertarians, especially during the last years of Trump’s first administration, when there was a strong alignment of elite institutions and some real attempts at pandemic-driven information control. But for now it appears that both the hopes and fears were overstated, that the internet remains an acid for trust in institutions and an enabler of rebellions in a way that makes consensus and conformism extremely difficult to sustain.

That column also includes a number of musings on the shape of the saecular order to come.  I'm limiting this post's focus to the value of truthful information distributed in an emergent way as the best counter to disinformation or misinformation.  You'd think that an obvious point.  Reason's Robby Soave reminds people it's anything but obvious.

What counts as hateful speech is purely subjective. Religious people, for instance, might find blasphemy to be hateful—but it's sufficiently obvious that the federal government cannot criminalize criticism of religion. Similarly, political figures might determine that their opponents running attack ads against them are examples of hateful messaging. If censorship was allowed on this basis, there would be no end in sight.

It's incredibly common to hear otherwise informed persons try to draw some distinction between hate speech and free speech, but they are misinformed: From the standpoint of the First Amendment, there is no recognized difference. Hate speech is free speech.

Misinformation is no different. The Supreme Court has not specifically taken up the question, but it should be sufficiently obvious that people can disagree on what is true and what is false. The Enlightenment principle that undergirds the First Amendment and democracy itself is that the best way to counter bad information is to allow everyone to speak. Investing some central government authority with the power to determine what is true can backfire horribly, since the government is frequently wrong. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic provides a powerful illustration of why criminalizing misinformation is a fraught project: Time and time again, the expert consensus among government bureaucrats was proven to be flawed, incomplete, or flat-out wrong. People need the right to disagree with one another, and with their government. Thankfully, Americans enjoy that protection under the First Amendment. There is no misinformation exception.

It's true that many progressive elites wish that they had the power to censor misinformation.

Pope Linus, Herbert Marcuse, Tim Walz, all of them threatened by an emergence they cannot manage.  Maybe suppressing that emergence isn't the best idea.