DON'T REGULATE INTERNET SPEECH.

A WORLD `CURATED' BY MEDIA IS NO WAY TO RUN A SOCIETY.

After Donald Trump's White House appearance last Thursday, in which he claimed that an election he had won was being stolen from him, CNN's Jake Tapper came on and said the president was lying, lying, lying, nothing he said was true, his nose was growing and his pants were on fire. I don't actually have the tape, so I'm paraphrasing here. But Tapper's message clearly was that the president was factually incorrect in just about everything he had said. “There is absolutely no evidence of election-rigging” was a media mantra until The Washington Post furnished the new mantra that a postal worker had recanted his previously sworn account of there having been tampering with postmarks on mail-in ballots in Erie, Pa. There was absolutely no evidence, you understand, and now what evidence there was had been recanted.

My first reaction to Tapper's reaction to Trump's statement was what a wonderful thing it is that a TV anchor can come on right after the nation's leader and say the leader has been speaking bollocks. He couldn't do that in Vladimir Putin's Russia or Xi Jinping's China. Or rather he could: once. In a majority of countries around the world, he'd face serious consequences. Maybe even in Justin Trudeau's Canada, given the close relationship between the Prime Minister's Office, on the one hand, and media budgets (the CBC's) and regulations (for all networks), on the other.

So the media's continuous calling out of Trump is a terrific reflection on freedom of speech in the U.S. — freedom of some kinds of speech, at least. On balance, however, having our understanding of the world “curated” by media guardians is not a great way to run a society. I don't doubt that Trump was mainly lying in his Thursday night statement. (My favourite cartoon making the rounds on the internet this week is of a glum Napoleon, hand in vest, insisting “I won Waterloo, by a lot.”) But I would really rather hear what Trump has to say and make up my own mind. Anyone who has reached the age of majority in this society, and even many who haven't, has learned how to tell when a politician is spinning. In Trump's case, the ratio of truth is in inverse proportion to the strength of the adjective (beautiful, tremendous, fantastic).

Anchors can help establish what's true by interviewing credible people of opposing views. But I have the old-fashioned — even, these days, fusty — view that the job of the anchor and of the journalist in general is to try to get to the bottom of what the reality is. Instant denunciation is less helpful in that regard than talking to people who have their hands on demonstrable facts (not alternative facts). The New York Times had a story this week titled “The Times called officials in every state: No evidence of voter fraud.” True, maybe they didn't call the right officials. Or maybe some officials they called were lying. But it's digging — not declaiming — that ultimately will get to the truth.

Anchors and journalists obviously have views on things. But the more they can keep their views to themselves, the more effective they will be in letting their viewers and readers make up their own minds. (Columnists, by contrast, are obliged to reveal their views.)

If we can't trust citizens to make up their own minds based on the evidence, we won't have a democracy to speak of. Evidence is always a more effective means of persuasion than browbeating or chanting.

That we citizens are better off getting our information in as unmediated a form as possible carries over to social media. In this case, however, an important objection to trying to curate the internet is simply the scale of the task. I'm not sure I trust the following numbers, which I got from different web sources. But even if they are order-of-magnitude wrong, they still make my point. Supposedly, there are 6,000 tweets per second, more than 150 million a day. Facebook has more than two billion users. Upwards of 350 million photos a day are posted to it. Other social media services process smaller but still staggeringly large amounts of information per day.

Policing all that would be like trying to listen in on all the world's phone calls or water-cooler conversations (remember those!). I assume the CIA or NSA or some other arm of the U.S. government does take on the phone calls. The Stasi doubtless did in the former East Germany and the KGB in the former Soviet Union.

But do we really want even good-faith actors watching over these millions, even billions of interactions and trying to signal which are wrong or hurtful and should be tagged or even blocked? I doubt artificial intelligence is up to the task and I'm certain human intelligence isn't and never will be. Who will the social media giants employ as fact-checkers and what will they pay them? Not enough, I'm sure, to attract the hundreds of thousands of Solomons who would be needed.

And then there's the argument that we supposedly can't trust big private corporations to do the policing right: they'll impart their own corporate biases in deciding what gets through and what doesn't. So we need a public agency to take over internet policing. In the U.S. it would be part of the executive branch. But you know who's in charge of the executive branch. That's right. The liar-in-chief.

Let's forget this fantasy of internet content control and stick to decentralized methods, caveat emptor, parental control apps, a free internet and informed, vigilant citizens.