Noisy Speech Externalities
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
5-16-2024
Abstract
A central tenet of contemporary First Amendment law is the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas – that the solution to bad speech is more, better, speech.1 This basic idea is well established in both judicial and scholarly writing – but it is not without its critics. My contribution to this volume adds a new criticism of the marketplace-of-ideas metaphor. I argue that there are circumstances where ostensibly “good” speech may be indistinguishable by listeners from bad speech – indeed, that there are cases in which any incremental speech can actually make other good speech indistinguishable from bad speech. In such cases, seemingly “good” speech has the effect of “bad” speech. I call this process by which ostensibly good speech turns the effects of other speech bad “a noisy speech externality.”
Keywords
content moderation, Freedom of Speech, social media, First Amendment
Publication Title
Media and Society After Technological Disruption
Repository Citation
Hurwitz, Gus, "Noisy Speech Externalities" (2024). Book Chapters. 459.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_chapters/459
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009174411.016
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009174411.016