The opposite of propaganda is not free speech. It is journalism.
The story of the last generation of media or so is that increasing free speech has not produced more journalism than we had before. Journalism, after all, takes work, time, money, ethics, and expertise, which platforms and algorithms can never provide. They have, instead, created an avalanche of propaganda. They have created the kind of conditions such that the majority of what folks in the US consume in 2026 wouldn’t have been allowed to reach a mass audience in the 1990s. They have created a culture that is every bit as propagandized as you might find in a more authoritarian country, the kind that the US looks down on for not embracing its culture of free speech. If anything, more free speech actually created less journalism, as local newsrooms around the country laid off staff or closed when the competition became an endless scroll of user-optimized propaganda. We’re not at the start of that story. We’re late in the mourning process.
Now, democracy is an information processing machine. When the information ecosystem is working pretty well, you can’t beat it for creating policies that benefit the most people. But when the ecosystem is broken, you may as well be working in an authoritarian state. And that, it appears, is the way things are resolving for the US. If you’re familiar with authoritarian states at all, you’ll know that they come in a variety of flavors — some are more or less competent, some value public welfare to a greater or lesser degree, some are investing in the future while others are investing in little besides their own repression. There’s range and evolution there. The end of a democracy is just the start of a different kind of story.
US democracy, of course, is not necessarily a bellwether for the rest of the world. There are countries with a better information culture, for now, than the US, despite some of the same technologies. But they have to recognize what works about their countries — and about robustly-funded public media particularly — if that’s going to stay the case. They have to take the warning they’re watching seriously, and invest in the robust journalistic culture that makes democracy viable — even if that means “cracking down on free speech,” as the right would have it.