The only possible remedy in the end is to build our societies, our law, and our culture to be resilient against those cases when people are wrong, because they often will be.
The arguments for free speech are fundamentally the same arguments for democracy itself.
If people can't decide the value of information, why again are we trusting in the decision-making value of each and every voter?
If we filter speech, maybe we should just cut to the chase and filter out voters by testing of some sort?
We don't let non-citizens vote. We don't allow free political speech nor the right to assembly at polling places. We have independent election observers. We have to ensure that the voting process is not polluted by actors who would wish to harm it.
Similarly, there are actors who want to harm the free and good faith discourse of our public forums, and acting to preserve those open forums is moral, though it will always be fuzzy.
I don't think that anyone is complaining about the filtering of deliberate fraud from outside influences. What people are complaining about are the obvious biases exhibited by the large social media companies. Take this new Hunter Biden example. Twitter claims that they don't want to promote hacking and releasing of private information. Hunter Biden's laptop was abandoned, not hacked. Besides, where was that privacy stance a week or two ago when Trump's taxes were leaked? Facebook claimed unreliable sourcing for the story. Where were such concerns when anonymous sources were claiming that Trump had said that our troops were "suckers and losers"? Or when anonymous sources were claiming that Trump had been peed on by Russian hookers?
We have independent election observers.
Yeah and we balance things out by letting both major parties watch for funny business. Who watches Facebook and Twitter? Those companies are loaded with ex-Democrat operatives in senior positions. They've run out anyone who even smells halfway conservative. Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated time and again that they aren't just getting rid of fake news and bots. They're weighing in on complex political and statistical issues by silencing information sources that they don't like.
there are actors who want to harm the free and good faith discourse of our public forums
Yeah and evidence shows that some of those people are controlling information from within the social media giants.
Unfortunately, I think it's a bit of a classical liberal ideal that "the truth will come through and those who were wrong will see the error of their ways".
To some, the truth is a tool. If it's not a useful tool, it will be discarded. Probably a more useful tool, like hyperbole, decontextualization, gross mis-interpretation, or just adding "new facts" will be used.
I think it's naive to say that laissez faire speech is going to solve all issues, just like it'd be naive to say that peaceful protests would be a viable path to democracy in North Korea.
(Personally, I'd like to see bias recognition, propaganda recognition, and the ability to shift perspectives taught. A dumb, noncritical society is going to do and say dumb things)