Free Speech 2.0: In the age of Facebook and Google, can the marketplace of ideas be saved?

• Author: Longman, Phillip
• Position: "Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age" by Philip M. Napoli - Book review

It has been just over a century since Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes essentially invented the modern First Amendment by declaring that the "theory of our Constitution" requires government to preserve a "free trade in ideas." This, Holmes argued, was because "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."

Holmes was writing in dissent, but it didn't take long for the idea to catch on. In the 1927 case Whitney v. California, Justice Louis Brandeis joined Holmes in a landmark concurrence, arguing that when American political discourse becomes threatened by the dissemination and consumption of false speech, "the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

In the decades that followed, the notion that competition among ideas would correct error and spread truth became a central tenet of First Amendment theory. Conservatives and liberals differed often on what role they thought government should play to ensure that the marketplace of ideas remained open and competitive. But, by and large, there developed a consensus that in an open and competitive speech environment, truth will eventually overcome falsehood and democracy will thereby be served.

This helps explain why, when the internet first came on the scene in the 1990s, few observers saw it as a threat to democracy, much less to the very concept of truth. Indeed, conventional wisdom predicted just the opposite. The new technology would break down barriers to entry, empowering more people to engage in a global exchange of ideas, overthrowing old superstitions and barbarisms. Remember when people actually believed that Facebook and Twitter would facilitate the spread of democracy and human rights and the toppling of autocracies around the world?

Those hopes now seem painfully naive. From Russia to Myanmar to Pennsylvania Avenue, social media increasingly looks like a boon, not a threat, to illiberal regimes. What went wrong? And how can we fix it? Those are the questions that Philip M. Napoli, a professor of public policy at Duke University, sets out to answer in his new book, Social Media and the Public Interest. The rise of social media platform monopolies like Facebook and Google, Napoli argues, has created what he calls an "algorithmic marketplace of ideas" that is most notable for the waste products it produces. These include the loss of competition in the truth business caused by algorithmically engineered "filter...