Anyone who has studied the history of philosophy would know that the arguments you are making are classics among defenders of censorship: limiting speech for the "sake of speech" (over attention-seeking), "incentivize the context", "reinforce our humanity." None of these exempt you from managing speech, you're just trying to launder your values to a higher level - like what "good speech" is or whether a given speech-act appropriately "reinforces our own humanity." Tune the knobs of the social media platform until it starts producing speech I am more comfortable with.
Indeed much of JS Mill's On Liberty (1859) was dedicated to responding to these and others.
> we need to change our systems to incentivize human context around that speech
Who is the "we" who "should" do so? How does that "we" coordinate so that everyone building these systems builds them in the same way?
And why should these systems be optimized for whatever extrinsic goal you like better than "attention seeking"? That is managing speech.
The key difference here is that the speech is already highly managed and influenced to a degree never before seen in history. To think otherwise would be foolish.
Twitter isn't some natural state of the world that is pristine and unassailable; Facebook isn't the square in the park where people can speak their voice, and other choose to listen, participate, or walk along. Neither are anything like a book or newspaper.
If you're saying we shouldn't optimize or manage or turn the dials of these systems, then that's accepting that the current management and optimization and dials are somehow, inexplicably, acceptable or natural.
Someone has designed these systems and is influencing speech with their decisions. I don't have any power over them, but someone does, and the dials and designs of the system and the type of speech and communication they reinforce or encourage will change over time.
What gives them, the designers of the systems, any more right to manage their own system and the speech on it by their design choices? Are we to simply accept the corporations' design of their systems without critique or argument?
Not taking any action is to accept the current action, which still influences society. Not managing systems is to accept the current state of those systems, which still manages speech.
I do not see any difference whatsoever in those paths, so I will argue for trying to improve the systems.
Indeed much of JS Mill's On Liberty (1859) was dedicated to responding to these and others.
> we need to change our systems to incentivize human context around that speech
Who is the "we" who "should" do so? How does that "we" coordinate so that everyone building these systems builds them in the same way?
And why should these systems be optimized for whatever extrinsic goal you like better than "attention seeking"? That is managing speech.