Yeah, the Russia collusion hoax, for example, had a pretty severe negative impact on the quality of public discourse over the past six years. It was so impactful that some people still believe it.
But also bad for public discourse was the ban on talking about, on social media, Biden family corruption revealed from data on an abandoned laptop.
So allowing lies is bad, but also banning truths is bad. It's not always very clear initially what is true and what isn't. Even when details come to light, "fact checkers" often make judgment calls about things that are unknown, like human intentions.
The only sane policy if a platform wanted to prevent the spread of lies without preventing people talking about true things is to allow speech if in doubt, right up until it is proven to be false (which, again, is sometimes a judgment call).
This is pretty complicated, so Elon Musk's plan to simply allow "legal speech" seems already a decent compromise. Leave it to the people and their legislators to decide. After all, if you shouldn't be talking about something on Twitter, maybe you shouldn't saying it out loud. In which case maybe the legislature should ban the speech. Everywhere. Seems like a reasonable standard.
