Processed Free Speech

Jon Stewart came up with a phrase I can't stop thinking about

I was on a walk recently, listening to Trevor Noah’s podcast What’s Now, where he was having a conversation with Jon Stewart. This moment stood out to me, when Jon said:

"We think [social media] is free speech, but it’s not speech. It’s ultra-processed speech. It’s speech in the way that Doritos are food — it’s something that has been designed by people in lab coats to get past the parts of your brain that protect you.”

I love how Jon Stewart's "ultra-processed speech" metaphor succinctly reveals a profound crisis in how we collectively understand reality.

When our primary information diet consists of algorithmically manipulated content, it fundamentally warps our ability to distinguish truth from fiction, nuance from hyperbole, and genuine discourse from manufactured outrage.

Traditional information ecosystems had built-in filters: journalists, editors, peer review, and institutional credibility. Social media flattens these hierarchies, making a random tweet appear with the same visual weight as a scientific study or news report.

This creates what researchers call "truth decay" - the blurring of lines between opinion and fact, where all information seems equally valid or suspect.

Emotional Processing Over Critical Thinking

Because social media algorithms prioritize engagement over accuracy, they flood us with content designed to trigger immediate emotional responses rather than careful consideration. This conditions people to:

• React before reflecting - sharing outrageous claims without verification

• Mistake intensity for importance - assuming the most emotionally charged information is most significant

• Develop confirmation bias addiction - seeking information that validates existing beliefs rather than challenges them

Real-World Cascading Effects

This information distortion manifests in concrete ways:

Political Polarization: When algorithms show us increasingly extreme versions of our own views while demonizing the "other side," democratic compromise becomes nearly impossible. People aren't just disagreeing on policy; they're living in fundamentally different factual universes.

Public Health Crises: During COVID-19, "ultra-processed" health information spread faster than accurate medical guidance, leading to vaccine hesitancy, ineffective treatments, and policy resistance that cost lives.

Economic Decisions: Financial misinformation spreads rapidly through social media, from cryptocurrency pumps to investment scams, causing real financial harm to individuals who can't distinguish genuine financial advice from engineered manipulation.

Social Fragmentation: Communities fragment as people retreat into increasingly narrow information silos. Families split over QAnon theories, friendships dissolve over political posts, and shared civic reality erodes.

The Illusion of Being Informed

Perhaps most dangerously, consuming vast quantities of "ultra-processed speech" creates the illusion of being well-informed while actually making people more susceptible to misinformation. People mistake the volume of information they consume for the quality of their understanding.

Cognitive Overload and Simplification

When bombarded with processed information designed to grab attention, people's cognitive resources become overwhelmed. This leads to mental shortcuts:

• Binary thinking - complex issues reduced to simple for/against positions

• Tribal reasoning - evaluating information based on its source rather than its content

• Emotional shortcuts - using feelings as a proxy for facts

Democracy requires citizens capable of weighing evidence, considering multiple perspectives, and engaging in good-faith debate. When our information environment is optimized for engagement rather than understanding, it undermines these foundational capabilities.

Recognizing this dynamic is the first step toward media literacy that treats social media like junk food - something to be consumed sparingly and with awareness of its engineered effects on our cognitive processes. Just as we've learned to read nutrition labels, we need to develop the ability to recognize when our "speech" has been processed to manipulate rather than inform us.

The stakes aren't just individual but civilizational: a society that can't distinguish between authentic communication and algorithmically optimized manipulation struggles to maintain the shared reality necessary for democratic governance and social cohesion.