The article is here; the Introduction:
We are awash in lies. Misinformation has always been with us, but the endemicity of social media and the depth of political polarization in the United States and elsewhere has enabled falsehoods to be amplified, monetized, microtargeted, and spread around the world at unprecedented speed and scale. The consequences for democracy, public health, and social harmony are emergent and grave.
Misinformation presents one of the most vexing challenges for content moderation on social media (and off it, such as on cable news) for myriad reasons. Because misinformation can be difficult or controversial to define, policing it risks chilling core political speech, and because misinformation often resists automated enforcement, it cannot be removed or countered nearly as quickly or as cleanly as it spreads. Government regulation of misinformation raises special concerns, both because public officials may be particularly susceptible to political bias and because even outright lies enjoy a measure of constitutional protection.
The orthodox U.S. constitutional response to harmful speech, including false speech, is counterspeech. As Justice Brandeis wrote in his canonical concurring opinion in Whitney v. California, "[i]f there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." The view that corrective speech is preferable to censorship resonates with Justice Holmes' famous intimation that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." The digital age has revealed Holmes' aphorism to be as absurd as ever, but he was prescient in saying "[t]hat at any rate is the theory of our Constitution." So it has become.
