Exactly, the current strain of Conservative "thought" is to attack all forms of authority in order to muddle the truth and introduce doubt that any subject is knowable or provable. Allowing misinformation to spread serves that goal nicely and all they have to do is sit back and do nothing.
Their entire goal is to create a society where their gut opinions are just as good as knowledge from experts, because experts hurt their feelings (e.g. the Conservative reaction to the 1619 Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_Commission).
> Exactly, the current strain of Conservative "thought" is to attack all forms of authority in order to muddle the truth and introduce doubt that any subject is knowable or provable.
Which is kind of a weird whiplash, because it was not all that long ago that that was the standard attack of the Right against the “postmodern” Left.
Why is it worth protecting speech that is knowingly false and inflammatory? Think about the paradox of tolerance. True free speech is under threat by the torrent of misinformation and from the constant assault on the very idea of expertise. We as a society have to be active agents to counter misinformation, we can't just sit by and hope it works itself out in "the marketplace of ideas" because that's not how misinformation functions. This is not a new problem, but the internet gives it a new scale which we have yet to reckon with.
>Why is it worth protecting speech that is knowingly false and inflammatory?
Because absurd opinion like "the earth goes round the sun" and "there's nothing wrong with being gay" were once "knowingly false and inflammatory" according to the overwhelming majority of people.
>Because absurd opinion like "the earth goes round the sun" and "there's nothing wrong with being gay" were once "knowingly false and inflammatory" according to the overwhelming majority of people.
... therefore we need to keep protecting the speech of people who still believe the world is flat and that homosexuality is an affront to God just in case?
No, I'm sorry, that's an appeal to emotion disguised as rationality. We don't need to keep knowingly false, disproven and regressive ideas around any more than we need to keep arguing the merits of miasma theory, phrenology or the luminiferous aether. To say otherwise is to claim that truth cannot exist, merit cannot be measured and all ideas are equally valid... a premise already discredited by the value judgement made by your argument.
Their entire goal is to create a society where their gut opinions are just as good as knowledge from experts, because experts hurt their feelings (e.g. the Conservative reaction to the 1619 Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_Commission).