Wed, 02/17/2021
This post is a summary of an article entitled “Madison and Shannon on Social Media” authored by Gus Hurwitz, Menard Director of the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center that appears in Volume 3, Issue 2 of the Business, Entrepreneurship & Tax Law Review.
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In the United States we have long cherished the idea that the “marketplace of ideas,” the free exchange of a wide variety of viewpoints afforded by our constitutional First Amendment, is the best corrective for misleading or malicious speech. First articulated by the iconic Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the “marketplace” analogy provides that, similar to a free-market economy, a robust public exchange of conflicting viewpoints will allow for the best ideas to win out, while misleading or misinformed arguments will end up on the ash heap of history. But what if the present high-volume marketplace of ideas, afforded by the rise of social media and ultra-low cost, low-quality internet content, has led to the type of market failure that economists have long identified in financial markets? In an era where we are constantly bombarded with content from all angles, are we as information consumers reaching a point where we are losing the ability to differentiate the “signal” from all the background noise?
In his recently published article in the Business, Entrepreneurship & Tax Law Review, Nebraska Governance & Technology Center director Gus Hurwitz draws on a number of fields, from Information Theory, to cognitive psychology, to informatics, to make the bold proposition that the “marketplace of ideas” approach undergirding First Amendment law may be inadequate for an era where online social media platforms have dramatically reduced the costs of generating and widely disseminating content, leading to an explosion in the availability of both high-grade knowledge, and low-grade misinformation. Hurwitz argues that the resulting flood of content has shifted responsibility for vetting the quality of information away from traditional intermediaries (e.g. publishers) and placed it squarely on the shoulders of consumers, with potentially-serious consequences for the viability of a healthy American democracy.
Hurwitz argues that crucial to understanding the United States’ exceptional level of commitment to freedom of speech is the historical context within which it arose. Freedom of speech, though not absolute, was seen as “a critical bulwark, and perhaps the most important organizing force, against the sort of government abuses that animated the American Revolution.” Indeed, that commitment can be viewed as being “part of our constitutional DNA.” Subsequent Supreme Court opinions expanded on that approach, concluding that, where bad or malicious speech was concerned, the remedy isn’t government censorship, it is instead “more, better, speech.”
Hurwitz argues that, while this approach to speech may have been adequate for a society where the dissemination of information was slow, and the costs of that dissemination (principally via printing press and post) were relatively high, they have become insufficient for the vast global media landscape within which we find ourselves today.
Hurwitz’s critical insight is in the application of Information Theory (a theory that combines mathematics, statistical analysis, physics, neurobiology and information engineering, among other disciplines) to explain the dilemma in which information consumers exist today. Here Hurwitz is building on the foundational work of Claude Shannon, who developed Information Theory in order to understand the theoretical technical limits of the technology then being developed at AT&T. In essence, much as a telephone line or a fiber-optic cable has a theoretical maximum capacity of information that it can transmit, so we as human beings have a finite ability to receive and process the information to which we are exposed.
Drawing on cognitive psychology, Hurwitz demonstrates that there is emerging evidence to suggest that there is indeed a relatively constant rate at which human beings are able to process linguistic information. As we as information consumers approach that limit (as information theory and the exponential growth of information suggests we will), Hurwitz argues that the traditional corrective for bad-speech, that is to say more speech, cannot be the answer, as this will only serve to overload our already overburdened cognitive systems, and informative, desirable speech will be treated as just more background noise.
Hurwitz doesn’t aim to provide a definitive solution to the failures in the marketplace of ideas, other than to state that greater government regulation of the content of speech cannot be the answer. But as his paper makes clear, our traditional, siloed academic approach is inadequate if we are to preserve the meaningful public discourse upon which our democracy is premised.
Tags: Guest and Fellow Post
