Mr. Zuckerberg missed an opportunity to recognize that there has been a hidden and high price of all the dazzling tech of the last decade. In offering us a binary view for considering the impact of their inventions, many digital leaders avoid thinking harder about the costs of technological progress.

Consider the messages tech leaders have been sending us.

They tout the convenience of instant delivery and the satisfaction of our needs through retail services like Amazon Prime, and they avoid the complex, negative impact of such services on traditional retailing and the many environmental considerations.

They assure us that the effortless ability to learn about anything in a jiffy from a Google search is a dream, and they avoid discussing the potential dangers of our reliance on a centralized information source that also has a major impact on the survival of all kinds of other media.

They speak to us of the miracles of keeping us all connected in a global skein of communications and information and commerce with a single hand-held device instead of facing up to the fact that humanity is being sucked into the matrix by addictive technologies that appear to separate us more than bring us together.

And they take a bow for providing us with the ability to say and publish whatever we want instead of adding up the real-world damage those words might cause, especially when spouted by those wishing to sow discord.

Rather than say “thank you” to Mr. Zuckerberg for his speech without asking any questions, I would like to discuss how giving marginalized people a voice is different from giving malevolent users the tools to manipulate sloppy digital platforms. I would like to discuss how free speech can be valued and protected, while also putting up guardrails against abuses. I would mostly like not to be lectured to about free speech in the most simplistic of terms by people who avoid hard questions about that freedom.

Just this week, we faced a typical social-media challenge: Are we any better off because President Trump gets to abuse social media by tweeting out that he was being subjected to a “lynching”? Or are we made worse, more exhausted and less united because Mr. Trump is allowed to say whatever he wants online without repercussions?