"Two events were wake-up calls. The first was Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about the astonishing extent of secret U.S. government monitoring of digital networks at home and abroad. The U.S. government’s domestic surveillance is legally constrained, especially compared with what authoritarian states do. But this is much less true of private actors. Snowden’s documents gave us a glimpse of the scale of surveillance of our lives by U.S. tech platforms, and made plain how the government accessed privately collected data to serve its national-security needs.
"The second wake-up call was Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. As Barack Obama noted, the most consequential misinformation campaign in modern history was “not particularly sophisticated—this was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.” Russia used a simple phishing attack and a blunt and relatively limited social-media strategy to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2016 election and wreak still-ongoing havoc on the American political system. The episode showed how easily a foreign adversary could exploit the United States’ deep reliance on relatively unregulated digital networks. It also highlighted how legal limitations grounded in the First Amendment (freedom of speech and press) and the Fourth Amendment (privacy) make it hard for the U.S. government to identify, prevent, and respond to malicious"
2) It's not a hot-take that titles don't agree with their article's contents. The solution to that is to fix headlines, not to plug our ears and only read headlines and claim nuance is impossible.
3) Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... for widely known example of (2)
> No person ever has made the claim that free speech doesn’t have costs.
Considering the entire article was about how people kept responding to nuanced articles by claiming that free speech didn't have costs and that dismissive and wrong, I think people did in fact make that claim.
Shocking!
I'm starting to think we Americans are going to have to overthrow the British monarchy to protect our rights!
> Even The Atlantic publishes its doubts about it.
Unlike the Prince Henry thing (who cares), I read this one.
The Atlantic says the exact opposite of what you say it does. It starts and ends firmly defending American style free speech. Full stop.
In the middle it talks about how European style free speech allows for suppressing hate speech, and that there are costs and benefits to that approach. He explains that calls for such restrictions here cannot be dismissed out of hand as insane but that they have to be contended with. He then does so, arguing against restrictions. "Free Speech isn't Free" is just pointing out the often overlooked costs to totally free speech.
I hesitate to call people bad-faith actors, but in general the "article says the literal opposite of what I claim it does" is a giant red flag.
(Edit: I went back and read the Prince thing. I dismissed it because "who cares", but then I figured if you misrepresented the Atlantic article that badly I should check it out. What he was talking about was American vs. British libel laws, not general free speech. In Britain, it is much easier to sue for libel to the point that celebrities often sue international publications there. This protection in Britain especially protects politicians and royalty. In the US, it is almost impossible to win a libel suit against a news organization, especially if the person suing is a public official. This is based on New York Times vs. Sullivan, a first amendment case. )