The Cure for Cheap Speech: Rick Hasen

April 2022

Apr 21

Written By

APRIL 21, 2022

“People love the United States and love the democratic experiment.”

Richard Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, and his new book is Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics and How to Cure It. We discuss the long-term dangers of cheap speech, which includes misinformation and disinformation, and ways to improve our information sphere in keeping with the First Amendment.

Cheap speech is lower-value speech that finds a way to rise to the top of social media, news outlets, and everyday conversation. This overabundance of misinformation and disinformation is easy and inexpensive to produce. While the problem of cheap speech is worldwide and ubiquitous, we discuss a uniquely American approach to solving it through the prism of the First Amendment. Potential solutions include disclosure laws about tweaking algorithms, privacy protections to prevent micro-targeting, antitrust regulations, and public pressure to demand high standards from media platforms.