Abstract:

Whether it is misinformation or death threats, hate speech or spam, foreign election interference or incoherent Facebook posts from a distant uncle, our public discourse suffers from information pollution: a haze of content that diminishes our capacity to foster the informed public necessary for a healthy democracy.   That observation, of course, is not original. Scholars have written countless pages on the topic through the lens of Section 230, the First Amendment, antitrust, privacy regimes, algorithmic transparency, information fiduciaries, the Fairness Doctrine, and more. But each of these policy proposals inevitably focuses on a narrow slice of the problem, leaving readers to contextualize it within the bigger picture themselves. Unfortunately for such readers, no bigger picture exists within the current literature; there simply is no framework that puts these diverse proposals in conversation with one another. We are left with a box of puzzle pieces but no sense of how they fit together, or even if they do.   This paper puts this interdisciplinary puzzle together. Drawing on literature across a variety of siloed fields: media studies, journalism, tech entrepreneurship, and the legal regimes governing speech, privacy, and competition. It puts forth an original systems map that explains in four parts how our country ended up with such a polluted public discourse:  

1. How our society transitioned from a public discourse mediated by journalists to one mediated by platforms;
2. How the shift to a platform-based public discourse undermined the traditional defenses embedded in the news media that used to filter information pollution;
3. Why the public discourse has consolidated onto a few massive platforms, and why information pollution proliferates so broadly on them; and
4. Why platforms have seemingly been unable to clean up the crisis themselves

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Details:

Publisher:	The Journal of Law and Technology at Texas | Austin, TX
Citation(s):	Max Levy, Information Pollution & the Public Discourse, 6 J.L. & TECH. TEX. 113 (2022–23).
Related Organization(s):	The Journal of Law and Technology at Texas
Attachment(s):	Download Now