/1 I've written a new essay: "Cheap Speech and What It Has Done (to American Democracy)" on fake news and much more https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3017598 …
/2 The paper is a response to a 1995 paper by @VolokhC predicting what the coming "cheap speech" era would mean for American democracy
-
-
/3 Eugene Volokh was optimistic that "cheap speech" via the Internet (and then social media) would solve media scarcity problems and
-
/4 give voters more choices of what to see, watch, hear. He knew it would hurt newspaper classified ads but didn't see how devastating
-
/5 Internet/social media have done tremendously great things in terms of access to diverse sources of information and viewpoints
-
/6 But it has a dark side for democracy too as it has seriously hurt mediating institutions of (especially local) news, political parties
-
/7 in place of media scarcity, we now have media firehose which has diluted trusted sources of information and led to the rise of fake news
-
/8 The demise of local newspapers sets the stage for an increase in corruption among state and local officials.
-
Rather than democratizing politics,cheap speech appears to be hastening the irrelevancy of parties by facilitating the ability of demagogues
-
/10 Social media also can both increase intolerance and overcome collective action problems, both allowing for peaceful protest ...
-
/11 but also supercharging polarization and raising the dangers of violence in the United States.
-
/12 SCOTUS libertarian 1st A doctrine did not cause democracy problems from cheap speech, but it may stand in the way of needed reforms
-
/13 It may facilitate foreign money in elections, lack of disclosure, more false speech
-
/14 Solution is not to allow government to ban fake news, surely a cure worse than disease
-
/15 But laws that might require disclosures/info from Facebook, Google may be in order
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.