Thank you.
I appreciate Dr. Dea weighing in on the philosophical side, because I think it is a philosophical question, no matter what.
For the most part, we're allowed to say and express false things. There are only narrow circumstances, legally, where falsity is a problem, whether criminally or civilly. These are circumstances of fraud, criminally, or defamation, civilly. I guess that's criminal too.
You were talking about narrow circumstances in which an individual's reputation is harmed. That space between misinformation and disinformation is really difficult to deal with, because the Supreme Court has made it very clear that we protect false information because it might be the ideas of the future. This is because, as Dr. Dea said, we might believe it to be true, and part of that process of expressing ourselves is how we all figure out the truth.
The challenge we're facing is that there's no doubt that it causes harm and that social media amplifies that harm because it reaches greater audiences. Some of the work I am exploring and I talk about a lot with my students is how elected officials are both the targets of attacks and face extraordinary harassment, but they also have tremendous power. When they say something, especially now with social media, it reaches an audience that is unprecedented, so falsity takes on a characteristic that we did not see before and [Inaudible—Editor] doesn't help us solve it.