Yes, they were. They were advocating a way of organizing society that had already killed tens of millions of people and would go on to kill tens of millions more. And they were relying on their audience not being aware of the death toll.

But, I don't think it's good for society that I can create a fake website purporting to be a way to vote online, and send it to members of an opposing political party to suppress their vote. If I know that I'm lying, there should be laws against that.

If we don't do anything, our problems are going to get so much worse as deep fakes improve and doctored footage becomes indistinguishable from reality.

What comes across as so hypocritical is that the people calling for restrictions on free speech were the same ones who benefitted from free speech in the past as they sought to push back against the establishment.

Except with new media no one can really push information, it is mostly up to the recommendation algorithms to propagate the messages, which is optimized for creating more engagement and ad dollars. This, singlehandedly damages more of democratic processes, which depend on healthy discourse, than any questionable content put into it.

> now use the shield of "free speech" to push propaganda and lies in order to undermine truth

Is there a form of free speech, contents of which you disagree that doesn’t push propaganda or undermine some definition of your truth? In other words, in this version of narrative warfare, every opponent narrative is already “propaganda”, every disagreement is “destroying democracy”.

Except truth is hardly an out there objectivity to which propgandic words magically render our eyes blind. It is a process of dialectic; disagreements that can be integrated together and form a more comprehensive picture of our musings in an infinite problem space.

It is the false sense of certainty, including utopian ideas of its attainability with likes of “fact checks” and judicious restriction of speech that destroy this process, and with it any hope of integrating opposing worldviews without wanting to hurt those who hold them.

Except truth by definition is objective. Opinions and beliefs are subjective. The earth is spherically shaped - this is not a subjective opinion, it is objective truth.

> including utopian ideas of its attainability with likes of “fact checks”

Aren't "fact checks" part of the free discussion? If a leader is spewing lots of falsehoods then it's up to the 4th estate to fact check him/her.

Except metaphysics of truth has been discussed for centuries and things are more complicated than that. Truth on matters most interesting to us is mostly transjective (neither objective nor subjective but depends on the interaction between the agent and the arena), because which truth you pursue is as important as what the thing is in itself, and the information we could seek about most things in themselves is inexhaustibly large.

“Earth is spherically shaped” is not an “objective truth” if you are calculating the response time of your radio transmission of your satellite over a ground station up north, you need to get more precise than a “sphere”.

> Aren't "fact checks" part of the free discussion?

Certainly they are allowed, but they are posturing an institutional authority they don’t have. It is not a magical epistemology machine that you can put in bleeding edge scientific research in and it will spew “truth”s out.

They are attempts to monopolize truth finding process, cheat the way out of dialectic with more institutions. There is no board or organization of “fact checkers”, no standards, no transparency. It is a branding gimmick.

Postmodernism is not the only critique of Kant. Although you're fighting a strawman, I agree with your criticism of postmodernism as used today, but that is not what I was talking about.

I am arguing indeed for making the best effort and especially about something that really matters. And it turns out "this is the objective truth" is one of the other escape hatches, especially since most of the questions that really matter are far more complex than the shape of our planet. Ethics, meaning, policy etc. they all require an ongoing process of being less wrong, which best works in opponent processing. There is rarely a terminal value for truth for these questions, there is always going to be an ongoing tension because the part of the reality we are trying to capture is inexhaustably complex. People who wrote the religious texts thought they were able to capture and codify the algorithm for "the right way", but we now see how inadequate they can be for our 21st century context. Anytime someone thought they had the key algorithm for utopia, they turned out to be the most evil machineries of our history sooner or later.

> But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

I think that guy is the most wrong. Because "what are we going to use this information for, what adjacent information that we haven't yet might be interesting, are we framing the question right" is the most critical parts of the query that goes unasked. If we are talking about walking on the street, the flat earth guy is just as correct as the sphere guy. Notice I am not saying his epistemology is correct, nor he is entitled to his own opinion and we should be pluralistic. I am saying as long as both guys only walk on the street, the difference opinions are completely inconsequential.

Now expand this to a question no one has a clear answer for. E.g. economic policy; some want it sphere, some want it flat. No doubt newspapers will be filled with people "it is flat, this is the objective truth". That is the use of going "hang on a second, we don't do objective truth here, we humbly pursue being less wrong, now dialogue with us, don't rhetorize your talking points, just honestly talk to us". Sadly, nowadays mass of the public discourse happens over channels that doesn't reward that but rhetoric and likes.

Exactly. They might have been fed garbage propositions that explain their garbage conclusions, but calling them insane, crazy, <pick-your-favorite-slur> is just a cop out of discomfort of the dialogue and co-existence, through the way of sub-humanizing them.

> It's wrong, and if your epistemology won't let you say it's wrong, your epistemology is broken, not vaccines.

I’d say on the contrary, “epistemologies” that demand purity and certainty (ideology is a better term for this) don’t tend to explain reality well and because of that they don’t survive in the long run. They are inherently maladaptive.

Except in politics we seldom care about such hard truths, but about which policy is best, what's better, what's moral, etc, which is subjective.