Comment by davidreiss

Everything you wrote is why we have freedom of speech protection.

> But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds.

It never mutated. The point of free speech is to give liars and truthtellers and everyone in between the right to speech. Otherwise, we only have speech from liars.

Free speech exists so that the liars don't get the monopoly on speech. That's everyone can have their say.

It's one of the reasons why we have progress. Imagine if we didn't have free speech. Then abolitionists or civil rights activist or LGBT activist or women's suffragists would never had a right to speak. The people in power would have denied them the right to speak.