Media Power Through Epistemic Funnels

• Author: Erin Miller
• Position: Assistant Professor, University of Southern California Gould School of Law
• Pages: 873-902

Media Power Through Epistemic Funnels

ERIN MILLER*

ABSTRACT

Media companies are often accused of having too much power. But what sort

of “power” do they have? In this essay, I offer an account of one crucial form

of media power: the power to change a person’s beliefs. Such power is possible

when the person gets most of their information on a given topic from one media

company—that is, when the person has fallen within what I call an epistemic

funnel. A company exercises this power by severely skewing the information

pools of persons within their funnel in favor of or against certain viewpoints. I

claim that exercising this form of power, like exercising coercive forms of

power, subverts the target’s agency. It does so not by thwarting the target’s

plans but by undermining their epistemic rationality, i.e., their ability to form

justified beliefs. The latter, I argue, requires reviewing evidence from multiple

and competing viewpoints. Thus, to contain this form of media power, measures

should be taken to diversify media consumers’ evidence pools.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. MEDIA AND EPISTEMIC FUNNELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 877

II. A BASIC EPISTEMOLOGY OF EPISTEMIC FUNNELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 879

A. Consultation of Balanced Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 880

B. Consultation of Balanced Filterers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 884

C. Echo Chambers and Backfire Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 885

III. EXERCISING POWER THOUGH EPISTEMIC FUNNELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 887

A. Defining Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 887

B. Defining Agency Subversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 889

C. Skewing Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 891

D. Objections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 892

* Assistant Professor, University of Southern California Gould School of Law. I would like to thank

Scott Altman, Jeesoo Nam, Greg Keating, Rebecca Brown, and Mathis Koschel for crucial

conversations about the ideas in this essay; Robin Craig and Abby Woods for helpful written comments;

and the staff of the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy for their editorial assistance. © 2022,

Erin Miller.

873

1. The Target’s Choice of Filterer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 892

2. The Target’s Ability to Exit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893

IV. THE DETERMINING FACTORS FOR SKEWING POWER . . . . . . . . . . . . 894

A. The Epistemic Funnel Itself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 895

B. Susceptibility of the Target. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 895

C. Constraints on the Filterer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 896

D. Transparency of Filtering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 899

CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 901

The criticism is commonly heard that the biggest American information com-

panies, like Meta and Alphabet, have too much political power.

1

See, e.g., TIM WU, THE CURSE OF BIGNESS: ANTITRUST IN THE NEW GILDED AGE (2018); K.

SABEEL RAHMAN, DEMOCRACY AGAINST DOMINATION (2016); Genevieve Lakier, The Great Free

Speech Reversal, ATLANTIC (Jan. 27, 2021), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/first-

amendment-regulation/617827/ [https://perma.cc/XME8-66R9]; Nathan J. Robinson, What Rights Do

We Have on Social Media?, CURRENT AFFS. (Jan. 13, 2021), https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/01/

what-rights-do-we-have-on-social-media [https://perma.cc/D5NT-FUWM]; see also Brooke Auxier,

How Americans See U.S. Tech Companies as Government Scrutiny Increases, PEW RSCH. CTR. (Oct. 27,

2020), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/27/how-americans-see-u-s-tech-companies-as-

government-scrutiny-increases/ [https://perma.cc/N5UJ-FMFT] (72% of American adults say that

“social media companies have too much power and influence in politics today”).

This criticism

pops up whenever these companies act in a way that has sweeping consequences

for public discourse, such as suspending Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account,

suppressing a news story that might have hurt Joe Biden’s candidacy prior to the

2020 election, or demoting misinformation about the 2020 American presidential

election.

2

See, e.g., Naomi Nix et al., Facebook, Twitter, Google Face Calls to Ban Trump Accounts,

BLOOMBERG (Jan. 8, 2021), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-08/facebook-twitter-

google-face-calls-to-ban-trump-from-accounts [https://perma.cc/AHT5-35QV]. See also Hannah Murphy

& Max Seddon, Big Tech Caught in Information War Between West and Russia, FIN. TIMES (Feb. 28,

2022), https://www.ft.com/content/e0a31741-ee65-42c0-b045-59c382a8a081 [perma.cc/92YW-2PWX];

Tim Murtaugh, Media Suppression of Hunter Biden’s Laptop Was Election Interference, WASH. TIMES

(March 24, 2022), https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/24/medias-suppression-of-hunter-

laptop-was-election-i/ [https://perma.cc/UN2E-FQEQ]; Shannon Bond & Bobby Allyn, How the “Stop the

Steal” Movement Outwitted Facebook Ahead of the Jan. 6 Insurrection, NPR (Oct. 22, 2021), https://www.

npr.org/2021/10/22/1048543513/facebook-groups-jan-6-insurrection [https://perma.cc/TY7T-MAU4].

This concert about excessive power has grounded calls, from both left and

right, for legally constraining or even breaking up these information-technology

giants.

3

See, e.g., WU, supra note 1 (endorsing antitrust solutions); Francis Fukuyama et al., How to Save

Democracy from Technology, 100 FOREIGN AFFS. 98 (2021) (rejecting antitrust solutions and advocating

market interventions that might require government regulation); Josh Simons & Dipayan Ghosh,

Utilities for Democracy: Why and How the Infrastructure of Facebook and Google Must Be Regulated,

BROOKINGS INST. (Aug. 2020), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Simons-

Ghosh_Utilities-for-Democracy_PDF.pdf [https://perma.cc/QK8L-MX7Q] (calling for the regulation

1.

2.

3.

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