"O’Neill: What do you think explains this indifference to the Twitter Files revelations?
Young: Until about 10 to 15 years ago, most people shared the belief of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. In a famous Supreme Court case in the 1920s, Brandeis said that the best remedy for bad speech wasn’t to suppress that speech, but to encourage people to rebut it in the public square, with more and better speech. And that became known as the counter-speech doctrine. It was one of the pillars of free speech across the West.
The view now is that in order to protect the integrity of democracy and to not allow election results to be distorted, misinformation and disinformation need to be suppressed on social-media platforms. There is a new notion that democracy depends upon suppressing bad speech.
This is also partly due to the establishment’s reaction to various election results, which didn’t go the way elites wanted them to go. The explanation in their minds for why Trump won the 2016 presidential election or why Brexit triumphed in the EU referendum is that ordinary people were fed misinformation or were misled in some way.
So this censorship is partly caused by a kind of elite panic. It’s a response to the rise of populism. And the elites’ way of trying to restore their authority is to control the flow of information."
