prior probability

Check out this beautiful essay by Jake Rossen, which is titled “The Enduring Mystery of the Oreo Cookie Design” (hat tip: @pickover).

Hello, fellow Earthlings! I now want to conclude my multi-part series on the problem of misinformation (see here, here, here, and here) by posing a simple rhetorical question: What’s so bad about misinformation and conspiracy theories and the like? After all, misinformation is an age-old problem; conspiracy theories have always existed, even in colonial times (see here, for example).

In fact, the irony of this entire series on the problem of misinformation is that, as my colleague and friend Matthew Yglesias has recently explained (see here), people are probably better informed now about most matters than in any other time in history. So even if Pozen, Benkler, Kapczynsky, and others are correct to believe that the Internet has made it easier for people to spread baseless conspiracy theories and other forms of fake news, at the same time the Internet has also made it easier to discover the relevant facts about any particular controversy. At worst, both of these information effects just cancel each other out.

More importantly, as I never get tired of repeating, the optimal level of misinformation in a free society is not zero. If some people want to believe that Big Pharma created the pandemic to boost profits or that Donald Trump is a Russian agent or that UFOs are real (oops!), they should not only be free to hold these beliefs; they should also be free to spread their beliefs and persuade others they are right, no matter how zany or wrong their beliefs are. At a minimum, living in a free society means that we must tolerate some level of stupidity and ignorance from our fellow citizens and neighbors. To conclude, misinformation is the price we pay for living in a free society, a sign that we are living in a vibrant and healthy democracy, not a sick or decaying one.

Is the marketplace of ideas broken? My colleagues David Pozen (Columbia), Yochai Benkler (Harvard), and Amy Kapczynsky (Yale) all seem to think so. I already dispatched Pozen and Benkler’s proposed cures — Pozen wants more big tech censorship (see here), while Benkler (here) wants more “social democracy” (like Trudeau’s Canada, I presume?) — and I also presented Professor Kapczynsky’s more nuanced package of remedial proposals in my previous post. In her ideal world, or if she were “Queen of the Internet” for a day, she would (1) require Big Tech firms to publicly disclose their algorithms, or what she calls “data publicity”, (2) she would break up Big Tech firms into smaller companies (“regulate their size”), and (3) she would even prohibit Big Tech firm from making money from their “data gathering” activities.

[Note: Kapczynsky also favors the creation of “public data trusts” and wants to “figure out new ways to support public media and intermediaries” — i.e. she wants the government to run its own social media platform. (You can read her entire essay for yourself here.) But this last proposal is so preposterous on its face that I won’t even bother refuting it here, except to ask a simple rhetorical question: Why does Kapczynsky trust the government with user data more than she trusts Big Tech?]

What about Professor Kapczynsky’s other Internet proposals, “data publicity” and anti-trust regulation? Read on:

1. Data publicity. The most glaring problem with Kapczynsky’s call for “data publicity” is that, with all due respect, she has not really thought through the likely real-world adverse consequences of this proposal. “Data publicity” may sound great on paper, but what effect would this policy (making data algorithms public information) have in practice? Alas, I suspect that data publicity would most likely give incumbent Internet platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon (the very firms that Kapczynsky deplores) a major advantage over future competitors by making it more difficult for new startups to enter the Internet platform market! After all, if new ventures were required to make their data algorithms public, then those algorithms could then be used by incumbent firms to fend off new entrants.
2. Size and data regulation. Kapczynsky further claims that the size and business practices of Big Tech firms like Google and Facebook must be regulated because those firms are too big, control massive amounts of sensitive user data, and have too much influence over the Internet advertising market. Sigh. Aside from committing the Nirvana Fallacy (see here, for example), Kapczynsky’s call for anti-trust regulation has two fatal flaws. One is that regulations are usually counter-productive. They increase the costs of doing business and thus end up stifling competition by making it more difficult for new entrants to enter the market. The other problem is that Google and Facebook are not really monopolies, for as I explained last fall in this post, if this were true, we would expect to see fewer online ads overall, which would be a good thing for most of us end users! (Why would we expect to see less ads if Google and Facebook were real monopolies? Because demand curves slope downwards: when monopolists sell ad space at higher than competitive prices, ad agencies buy fewer ads.)

To conclude, Kapczynsky calls out at least three Big Tech firms by name in her essay (see here): Facebook, Google, and Amazon. But how can three business firms, no matter how big or powerful, constitute a “monopoly”? This alleged monopoly is either a three-headed monster or non-existent, or as my colleague and friend Mark Lemley has observed, “it’s a bit awkward to point to multiple ‘monopolists’ in a single market”! (See Lemley, “The Contradictions of Platform Regulation”, Journal of Free Speech Law (2021), pp. 313-314, emphasis and exclamation point added). Perhaps the marketplace of ideas is not broken at all. Perhaps the supposed problem of misinformation is being overblown. I will consider those possibilities and conclude this series in my next post …

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.