I believe in absolute truth but that is increasingly unpopular in an increasingly relativist age.
However, I don’t trust any broad society wide effort to censor anything. Even if it works well now and the deceiving evil people of today are muted it WILL bite us down the road when evil people use the precedent and mechanism to silence truth.
I would rather we spend our time educating our people to be rigorous thinkers vs controlling what they are exposed to.
I don’t think its a 50/50 split on climate change. I think the majority think it is happening. The disagreement is more on the confidence that this is something govt could ever address via policy and if the policy cure would be worse than the disease. Assuming alignment there it goes to, ok now what policy concretely? Blue states like CA have been warning about climate change and pollution for a long time and while an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure they have been meh on the former and disastrous on the latter. My confidence that more left politicians can shift course or even soften the blow is low.
I dont think we should control information just because someone doesnt like it.
It doesn't have to be 50/50. Misinfo props up a small but significant minority to "counter" something like climate change, a theory that is all but proven everywhere except in public opinion.
The stakes are too high (democracy, climate change, public health) to allow purposeful lies to cloud our ability to actually address these problems. These are weaponized lies, not benign mistakes.
Misinformation is subjective. There is nobody we can trust to be the arbiter of what is misinformation and what isn’t.
Also the first attempts have failed terribly.