If you accuse your opponent of eating babies at breakfast, other parties will have a hard time to find something as punchy, and some minority of people will swallow your statement. Throw around enough of these and you’ll have a large base covered, with your opponents left scrambling for boring or after the fact retorts that won’t have the same reach.
For instance I read a headline about future rising petrol prices due to the stuck Evergreen boat, and honestly I have no idea how true it is, don’t care enough to go down the rabbit hole, but still remembered it as an information, and might subconsciously be influenced by it on some decisions.
This is less likely to happen on fields I have decent interest or expertise in, but that only represents a tiny fragment of the information we consume everyday.
Last spring the CDC and the WHO were consistently wrong on masks, on asymmetric spread, etc on just about everything.
Maybe the experts themselves don't even trust what is supposedly the truth anymore.
Sadly, this asymmetrical warfare from authoritarian nations hits the right point: it forces us to either let misinformation flow and people become manipulated by it, or to revert to authoritarian measures by gradually chipping away freedom of speech.
given the power these platforms have, i highly doubt this attempt to regulate their business in a clearly negative way to them, can be successful. they are so powerful, even CCP is afraid of them, starting a crackdown on social media in China.
Similarly, there are large groups of people that believe there are large groups of people who believe that censorship like this validates a worldview in which powerful interests are censoring true information in order to maintain control. The degree to which the respective beliefs of these two groups of people are actually correct, is unknown.
I suspect that the group of people that believe this is considerably smaller than the other two groups, at least in Western cultures.
I believe this phenomenon is (at least in part) what Hindus refer to as Maya.
It seems like the better solution is to have an outpouring of discussion around how and why the claim is wrong. Let others ridicule the statements, rather than shutting down discussion. You'll never convince everyone, but at least you'd avoid the validation-by-censorship effect.
I could be wrong on this though. I don't really have any evidence or data that would show doing it one way is better than the other. I suppose I simply prefer open discussion.