Alex Jones and Infowars gets 'disappeared' - are we headed in the right direction?

[Dr H]

The key point you raise is that of consequences.  While all speech may be permitted, the intelligent person realizes that speech of any sort may have consequences.  If I use words in a situation which I have reason to believe are likely to provoke hostile reaction, and somebody slugs me for them, I really can't complain; there's no one to blame but myself.

The problem is that the power that the arbiters of these social medium platforms enjoy is not analogous to that you enjoy in your own home, which is both rather limited, circumscribed, and shared ubiquitously.  All that making such an analogy shows is that we can use bad analogies to overlook and ignore relevant disanalogies.

I'm not sure I get your point.  Are you suggesting that the arbiters of social platforms should have less power, or that the ubiquitous "I" should have more?

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The solution to bad speech is not censorship, it's more speech; good speech.

This has proen to be completly inefficient as a strategy.

It's true that preserving freedoms is often an inefficient process.
Doers that mean they're not worth preserving?

You cannot counter disinformation with more information.

If that's true, then I guess we'd better start teaching creation "science" in biology classrooms; nobody wants to listen to all that evidence-supported evolution stuff.

That's how disinformation works. You create so much noise it's impossible to hear anything.

Disinformation is just deliberate misinformation.  It's been with us for as long as human beings have had language, if not longer.  Making a lot of noise is one strategy, but it's not required.

Sometimes it's who you can get to swallow the hook that's more important than how many people swallow the hook.

There are two ways to control information. Either you censor it so that only one version, your version, is accepted or you drown people in so much information that no matter what happens you will manage to impose your message to a large portion of the population. Both censorship and disinformation are tools to control what information people have access to. Both require different strategies and measures to be neutralised as much as possible.

That pretty much seems to assume a binary scenario -- it's either "their" information, or "our" information.  I don't know of too many situations that lie along such neat black/white lines.  

I submit that a better approach is to train as many people as possible in critical thinking, let all the information flow, and then trust them to make up their own minds.