Do you think the Biden administration should shut down Fox News? (poll)

[Silent3]

114. What I would like, and it might require amending the Constitution (that is to say, might be pratically impossible)...

...is for blatant, deliberate spreading of misinformation and disinformation to be legally actionable the same way defamation is not treated as protected speech.

One has to be careful, of course, not to treat true, honest differences of opinion, even differences of opinion arising out of hate and stupidity, as unprotected speech.

To a certain extent, some protection against misinformation and disinformation exists, but only when a particular party can claim defamation, as in the Dominion win over Fox News.

We should further, however, also treat things like COVID disinformation the same way, when something as important as people's health and life, not only mere reputation, are at stake.

And although this could get very tricky when moving into the political realm of speech, at a certain point, when people spread lies about elections being rigged at the risk of destabilizing our democracy, for example, anyone who can be proved to not merely be voicing a poorly-formed opinion, but knowingly lying to produce false distrust, should be restrained and held accountable.

I used to believe that even deliberate lies should be protected free speech, with the only remedy being other people using their free speech to argue for the truth against those lies. I've come to realize that disinformation and propaganda techniques are far too pernicious to go unchecked, and their effects too powerful to be answered by mere rational counterarguments.