Elettra Bietti explains how the discourse around online speech forms an insoluble circle that needs to be broken.
“Platforms, governments, and individuals act in ways that are often aligned and create a polluted, harmful, and polarized information ecosystem,” writes Bietti. “Dualist and triangular understandings of speech are circular because they tend to center blame and legal attention on how each of these groups of actors reacts to and constrains the others, obscuring the overall context in which these different actors act in concert to shape communications. These views thus circularly contribute to an understanding of online speech as being ‘unsolvable.’”