prior probability

Happy 2/2/22! Last week, I reviewed two of three essays published by the Knight First Amendment Institute on the marketplace of ideas, one by David Pozen; the other by Yochai Benkler. In summary, both Pozen and Benkler blame social media and Big Tech for the problem of misinformation, but Pozen’s dystopian solution basically boils down to censorship, while Benkler’s wishy-washy solution is to call for more “inclusive social democracy,” whatever that means. (For the record, my critique of Pozen’s misguided call for Internet censorship is available here, and my critique of Benkler’s magical thinking is here.)

Today, however, I will review Amy Kapczynsky’s thoughtful contribution to the Knight Institute’s three-part series. To the point, her main critique of the marketplace of ideas is that the online version of this “market” is not really a competitive one; instead, it is dominated by Big Tech firms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. (Me: She left out Microsoft!) In other words, so long as misinformation is profitable, and so long as lies and fake news attract more attention and sell more ads than truth, the problem of misinformation will not be solved through the free exchange of ideas on the Internet.

So, what is to be done? To her immense credit, Kapczynsky, a law professor at Yale (my alma mater!) is not calling for Internet censorship the way that David Pozen and many others are. (Kevin Roose, I’m looking at you!) Nor does she conjure up some magical solution like “social democracy” the way Yochai Benkler does. Instead, her main policy recommendations are as follows:

1. First off, my fellow Yalie recommends legislators to enact new “data publicity” laws and courts to scale back the scope of trade secret law in order to require the disclosure of Big Tech algorithms to the public. (Under existing law, such algorithms are protected as trade secrets.) As an aside, if I were Kapczynsky I would use a catchy slogan like “release the algorithms” to popularize her intriguing “data publicity” idea.
2. Next, Professor Kapczynsky recommends anti-trust regulators to go after Big Tech firms by either “regulating their size” (i.e. breaking them up into smaller companies) or “restricting certain types of profit-seeking data gathering and use” (perhaps by preventing Internet platforms from sharing user data with third parties). (Me: where have we heard this before?) In other words, Facebook, Google, and Amazon (again, what about Microsoft?) are too big for our own good and their data policies need to be publicly regulated directly and not left up to private user agreements.
3. Lastly, Professor Kapczynsky concludes her essay by suggesting that “we must explore the possibility of public data trusts and figure out new ways to support public media and intermediaries.” In plain English, Kapczynsky is calling for a government-run social media platform (me: uh, no thanks) and for NPR and PBS to receive more public funding (me: hmm).

I will respond in greater detail to these policy proposals in my next post, but in the meantime, notice how Kapczynsky — along with Pozen and Benkler, to be fair — has missed the most obvious and appealing way of making “the marketplace of ideas” more competitive: the creation of an actual market, which is precisely what I propose in my forthcoming paper “The Leibniz Conspiracy“. That is, if social media misinformation were really a unique or serious problem (and I agree with Benkler that it is not), then why not create an actual information market and allow people to place bets on the truth values of fake news and conspiracy theories? Any takers?

Happy Presidents’ Day (USA)! I will proceed with my series on the marketplace of ideas in my next post. In the meantime, I am re-posting this map of the settings of Shakespeare’s plays. (You may order the map here.)

Check out this excellent essay by Jesse Spector (via Deadspin). Here is an excerpt: “… the owners are trying to make every last penny available, and the lockout will end when they feel they’ve squeezed until they can squeeze no more. Watching it happen in real time … is simultaneously painful and uninteresting. If I wanted to watch capitalists in their final form, manipulating workers and ignoring anyone or anything caught in the crosswinds of their greed, I could look at any other industry in America.”

Alas, Mr Spector and others fail to realize that this labor dispute is a “reciprocal problem” — to borrow my intellectual hero Ronald Coase’s thought-provoking formulation. To see this, here is how I would re-write Spector’s sentence:

“… the [players] are trying to make every last penny available, and the lockout will end when they feel they’ve squeezed until they can squeeze no more. Watching it happen in real time … is simultaneously painful and uninteresting. If I wanted to watch [labor unions] in their final form, manipulating [their firm’s customers] and ignoring anyone or anything caught in the crosswinds of their greed, I could look at any other industry in America.”

This provocative tweet from Celine Leboeuf (@philo_celine) popped up into my Twitter feed the other day, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since!

In my previous post, I critiqued David Pozen’s misguided critique of the marketplace of ideas. It turns out, however, that Pozen’s essay is just one of three contributions in a larger series of essays on the theme of “Lies and Counterspeech” published by the Knight First Amendment Institute. The other essays are by Yochai Benkler, who calls the marketplace of ideas a “myth”, and Amy Kapczynsky, who prefers the label “magical”. Alas, the recommendations made in both of those essays are no more sensible than the call for Internet censorship in Pozen’s essay.

In his otherwise excellent essay, Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Harvard, ends up substituting one set of magical/mythical ideas (the marketplace of ideas) for another (social democracy). To the point, he proposes, and I quote, “building a multi-racial coalition aimed to construct an inclusive social democracy in which people actually have a stake and have reason to trust governing elites.” Seriously? That’s his solution? Putting aside the vagueness of this tired normative plea, this multi-racial coalition already exists — it’s called the Democrat Party! (In any case, even the Republican Party has attracted a growing number of minority voters.)

For her part, Amy Kapczynsky, a law professor at Yale, offers a more specific set of solutions in her contribution to the series (see here). I will review her solutions and respond to them on Monday.

My colleague David Pozen, a law professor at Columbia University, recently wrote this essay on “the problem of lies and deception in the contemporary mass public sphere.” (Hat tip: Brian Leiter.) To the point, Professor Pozen critiques the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor, claiming that there is no empirical evidence for the proposition that a more open marketplace of ideas leads people away from falsity and toward truth. Professor Pozen writes: “We have no basis in evidence or experience to predict that increasing the quality or quantity of true speech on the Internet will reliably neutralize false speech or inculcate true beliefs in society.”

So, if the marketplace of ideas metaphor is just wishful thinking (although, for what it’s worth, Pozen is only able to muster up two obscure law review articles, a 2018 paper by Philip M. Napoli and a 2010 essay by Frederick Schauer, in support of this conclusion), what is to be done? How can we limit the salience and spread of false speech on the Internet?

For his part, Professor Pozen proposes three “solutions” — countermeasures, I might add, that are far worse than the supposed problem he is trying to cure. Among other things, Pozen wants Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook to (1) prioritize authoritative news sources, (2) downrank or remove deceptive content, or (3) impose penalties on serial purveyors of harmful lies. In other words, Pozen favors censorship and wants us to place more of our trust in Big Tech algorithms. (Don’t just take my word for it; scroll down to paragraph six of his essay for yourself.)

Sigh. The problem with Professor Pozen’s approach to misinformation is that, as Frank Ramsey taught us almost 100 years ago, the truth about any given proposition is not always a binary or all-or-nothing entity. Instead, truth is often probabilistic. That is why I reject out of hand Pozen’s misguided and draconian call for more censorship and more penalties. Instead of trusting Big Tech to be less evil, why not recreate an actual marketplace of ideas by allowing people to place bets on the truth or falsity of contested propositions? That is precisely what I propose in my forthcoming paper “The Leibniz Conspiracy“!

To conclude, Pozen himself acknowledges in the closing paragraph of his essay the need for “greater epistemic humility” and how it is “more difficult than ever to secure broad agreement as to what counts as misinformation.” Agreed! And that is why betting markets in fake news and disputed conspiracy theories would be far better than censorship.

That is the name of this fascinating guessing game that I stumbled upon as I was reading “The Biggest Bluff” by Maria Konnikova. This game was invented in the early 2000s by two poker players, Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak. According to poker legend, they spontaneously decided to spice things up during the grind of a high-stakes poker tournament in Europe by asking a third party (fellow poker player Johnny Lodden, pictured below top left) a random question, such as “How old is Clint Eastwood?” Laak and Esfandiari then agreed to bet on what they thought Lodden’s answer would be. To keep the game honest, I imagine that Laak and Esfandari asked Lodden to write down his answer ahead of time. Either way, what I find so fascinating about this game is that the true answer to the original question doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is what Laak and Esfandari think Lodden’s answer will be. In fact, it does not matter what the questions are either–the crazier the question the better! More details here.