I understand now, and it's hard not to agree with that perspective.

On the other hand, because of the fundamental relationship of the free press and health of democracy, shouldn't there be some kind of criteria for validity the same way that health claims in advertising do, for example? I understand that some things are subjective and impossible to apply criteria to, but what about cases where people are knowingly publishing demonstrable falsehoods to mislead masses of people. Seems like a major problem. Btw, im not sure what my opinion is on this.... Im just "devil advocating", I guess.

EDIT:/foundational/fundamental Im having a hard time with words today. :/

I honestly don't know. I think in general though, we should try to make information be as available as possible. Most of the justification for regulations about communications content comes from a time when most people had only three television channels, and a few newspapers.

Also, China has used exactly the same justification for censoring their information. And they're not wrong. People do knowingly spread misinformation and harm others.

I think that it's a really tempting problem to want to solve. If we could just find some heuristic to know for certain that something was "fake", we'd have it all figured out.