INFO 601-02 – Assignment 3 – Event Attendance – Vella Voynova
How does the Internet impact freedom of speech? What does this mean for liberty? These questions occupy Moran Yemini, a Senior Fellow at the University of Haifa’s Center for Cyber Law and Policy and a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and Cornell Tech’s Digital Life Initiative. Yemini explored these questions at length at Cornell Tech’s seminar on March 7, 2019, “The New Irony of Free Speech.”
What is the irony of free speech?
The original irony of free speech that Yemini references was introduced in 1996 by Owen Fiss. Fiss argued that freedom of speech laws were originally intended to protect citizens from state interference, but gradually came to favor the wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else. While the laws granted everyone the same liberty to speak, only those with clout and authority could afford the expressive capacity to make their speech heard. The advent of the Internet and what Yemini calls the digital ecosystem democratized expressive capacity and gave citizens an online platform to reach bigger audiences across greater distances. Yemini’s “new irony” of free speech is that what we have gained in expressive capacity, we have lost in liberty to speak. Although the Internet carries our speech louder and farther, it makes us more vulnerable to interference. The use of the word “irony” perplexed some of the audience. Yemini explained that he finds irony not only in how the Internet has subverted expectations that it would solve the problem of free speech, but also in how much of the public believes that the problem has been solved.
Free speech and democracy
Audience questions also led Yemini to clarify that the problems and conditions he describes are found in liberal democracies and do not apply to authoritarian countries. While true that citizens in democracies enjoy more liberty through media, they should not take these conditions for granted. In a democracy, competition determines who controls media development, which makes the media a constant battleground (McChesney, 65). Competition is more intense when democracies face critical moments, such as negotiating the rules for Internet speech.
How does the digital ecosystem interfere with our liberty to speak?
During the majority of the seminar, Yemini discussed how the digital ecosystem interferes with our liberty to speak. Sources of interference are all around us: search engines that track histories and manipulate results, as well as broadband and cloud providers who create the framework for Internet speech. Additionally, media ownership concentration forces us to rely on digital platforms that conduct mass surveillance. This does away with our anonymity and enables media companies to manipulate us through data collection. Lawrence Lessig has already pointed out the value of privacy and anonymity. In order to protect these values on the Internet, we need to monitor those who design and profit from the digital ecosystem (Lessig, 104). The corporate and political actors who shape the Internet are not neutral in their motivations and have the means to interfere with our liberty to speak.
The technologically induced endowment effect
Yemini’s conclusion emphasized the importance of the technologically induced endowment effect: it is much harder to part with technology that we use than it is to live without that technology in the first place. While the increased individual freedom of the Internet may be gratifying and obvious, the interference allowed by the digital ecosystem is not always directly felt or perceived. We are in danger of becoming so dependent on the Internet’s expressive capacity that we may become willing to overlook the less apparent ways in which it curtails our liberty.
What happens next?
While Yemini outlined how the Internet is transforming freedom of speech and threatening our liberty, he did not propose clear solutions. Given his legal background, I expected to hear about how constitutional law could be used to approach the problem, or suggestions for policies that could safeguard our liberty to speak in a complex digital ecosystem. Jürgen Habermas argued for the necessity of a public sphere where citizens are free to express themselves without worrying about interference (McChesney, 66). After listening to Yemini, it is impossible not to be concerned that most of us perceive the Internet as a public sphere without giving sufficient thought to the ways in which its current structure interferes with our liberty to speak.
References:
Lessig Lawrence. (1999). “Open Code and Open Societies: Values of Internet Governance,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 74, 101-116.
McChesney, Robert. (2013). Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. New Press.