Responding effectively to wholesale knowledge rejection may require that we rethink our criminal and civil penalties for spreading damaging untruths.

Currently, when confronting libel and slander, it’s necessary to show that some specific individual has been harmed by it.  But if it’s important not to allow one person to be damaged without penalty, how could it be any less important to prevent the whole population from being damaged?

Social media are major enablers of weaponized untruth, via algorithms that are designed to hook people by showing them ever-more extreme statements of things they already believe.  It would therefore seem appropriate to in some way hold them accountable for the damage caused by the untruths their irresponsible profit-maximizing practices have spawned.

Of course, successfully prosecuting or suing them would likely require exposing exactly how their algorithms work—for which they would no doubt claim they’ve had a competitive advantage taken away from them.  But here again, we’d be well advised to take a broader view, and ask why some individual or corporation’s ability to make money from antisocial activity should be considered more important than the health and wellbeing of our democracy.

Let’s get back to basics.  If someone poisons our drinking water, we’d expect there to be severe penalties—no matter whether this was directly intended, or simply the result of negligence. Why shouldn’t we have comparably serious consequences for poisoning the electorate’s minds?

This doesn’t need to be as difficult to define or reasonably prosecute as it might seem.  The same as with water supplies, allowing demonstrable falsehoods to enter the stream of public discourse, whether by willful intent or mere negligence, ought to be a major no-no, with the level of penalty imposed varying according to the degree of willfulness or negligence involved, as well as the degree of precautions taken to guard against it and the speed with which a breach is corrected.