Should there be more regulation of the internet?

We are living in the middle of the rise of social media.  As a result, misinformation and disinformation are spreading much quicker than before.  Everyday citizens each have their own digital footprint; each citizen that has access to social media has an influence on the content that circulates through the social media platforms.  Many people enjoy clutching their pearls when it comes to their first amendment rights.  As we all know, the first amendment grants US citizens the right to pretty much say whatever they want AS LONG AS their speech isn't a threat to the safety of the American people.

An issue that I keep bringing up in my assignments, my blogs, and my participation in class is that truth is a relative term.  Truth can mean one thing to someone and a completely different thing to another.  People have their biases that dictate what they see as the truth.  This is dangerous because, tying this back to our digital footprints, social media users can influence impressionable people in a negative way.  It is difficult for many people to detect misinformation, whether it be due to laziness or naivety.  As a result, misinformation spreads like wildfire.  People think they are spreading the truth, but really they often don't know what they're talking about.

Sporadically throughout the past year or two, my brothers and I discuss politics and the polarity of the US.  More often than not, we complain about the stupidity of people sharing illogical memes on Facebook that blindly support their political beliefs.  We show even more frustration that there is a good amount of people (friends of the poster) that show their agreement with the meme and add their own fuel to the misinformation fire.  They so obviously fall for the misinformation they see and blindly spread it out for others to see, that it makes us wonder what can possibly be done to stop this spread of misinformation.

Facebook (now Meta) started implementing fact checks on these kinds of posts, but obviously that didn't work.  Right-wing media did their best to stir the pot with regards to Facebook fact checks, as outlined by this Fox News article that argues there are liberal biases among the fact checkers. So, people are being told to distrust the fact checks. The people that spread the misinformation posts get angry at the fact checks and conclude that it's "big media" trying to silence the truth.  They have started tailoring their posts to the fact checks, telling the users to ignore them and write them off as a form of silencing their rights.  While this is clearly an illogical argument to me, many impressionable people believe this argument and begin believing that fact checks suppress their first amendment rights.  So, the fact checks really aren't doing much.  The people that actually read and understand the fact checks didn't need the post to be fact checked for them in the first place.

So what else is there to be done?  My brother has brought up a no-toleration policy by the social media platforms.  He thinks that as long as right-wing misinformation is being spread, accounts should be suspended or deleted, and the posts should also be deleted so they never make it out to a big population in the first place.  I have argued that this is more dangerous than the misinformation in itself.  I think this would be a final straw for these people and it would push them to a point of blatant violence.  I understand that they are already doing bad things because of the misinformation, but I think silencing them completely would have larger implications.  I wish this were possible, but it's not.  These people would think their truth is being silenced, and they would argue their rights are being infringed.  It's valid because they hold opinions, and it probably wouldn't be fair for one side of the political spectrum to decide what the truth is.  The fact checking is a soft version of this, but that also didn't work.

I believe that the internet is too far along to be regulated to many extents.  It's more up to the accountability of the individual person to believe what they believe.  I think the problem of believing conspiracy theories is a much deeper problem than just seeing a social media post and believing it.  I think these people have much deeper psychological problems that need to be addressed.  Taking their social media away doesn't seem like the best idea to me.  Misinformation is a problem that needs to be addressed, but we need to be careful with every citizen's first amendment rights.