True facts by themselves are usually insufficient to make a well-supported argument

Not infrequently, very bad arguments are constituted of entirely true facts.  True facts which are stripped of context and meaning.  

Freedom in general and Free Speech in particular has startlingly fewer defenders than I would have thought.  I enjoyed this piece, The Media Very Rarely Lies by Scott Alexander.  His subheading is "With a title like that, obviously I will be making a nitpicky technical point."

Which is:

The point is: the media rarely lies explicitly and directly. Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false. When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.

It drives me crazy when NPR or NYT or some other mainstream media insistently try and parse Misinformation, Disinformation and Hate Speech as forms of Free Speech which are legitimate to suppress.  NO!  The "you idiots" is sotto voce.

Alexander provides multiple examples from the fringe and from the mainstream where individuals are making technically accurate arguments which are logically fallacious, evidentially unsupported, or lack sufficient context for the implied decision-making.

Okay, that’s my nitpicky point. Who cares? Obviously all of this kind of stuff is more than deceptive enough to in fact leave a bunch of people misinformed. So why do I care if it misinforms them by lying, or by misinterpreting things and taking them out of context?

I care because there’s a lazy argument for censorship which goes: don’t worry, we’re not going to censor honest disagreement. We just want to do you a favor by getting rid of misinformation, liars saying completely false things. Once everybody has been given the true facts - which we can do in a totally objective, unbiased way - then we can freely debate how to interpret those facts.

But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context. But nobody will ever agree what context is necessary and which context is redundant.

[snip]

Nobody will ever be able to provide 100% of relevant context for any story. It’s an editorial decision which caveats to include and how many possible objections to address. But that means there isn’t a bright-line distinction between “misinformation” (stories that don’t include enough context) and “good information” (stories that do include enough context). Censorship - even the “safe” kind of censorship that just blocks “fake news” - will always involve a judgment call by a person in power enforcing their values.

I am both outraged and alarmed that so many of our mainstream media and our public intellectuals are either explicitly or tacitly calling for more censorship.