Misinformation

ProMarket student editor Surya Gowda reviews Jeff Kosseff’s arguments for protecting the free marketplace of ideas despite the harms of misinformation in his new book “Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation.”

Alan D. Jagolinzer and Sander van der Linden highlight a dangerous trend of influencers who deliberately target corporations with disinformation, called “rage farming.” The authors use United Airlines to illustrate the damage this can cause to a business and argue that corporations should counter rage farming with proactive messaging rather than staying silent.

Ashutosh Bhagwat argues in new research that expecting social media platforms to serve as gatekeepers for the “truth” flounders on economic, organizational, and democratic grounds. In fact, the end of media gatekeepers and elite control over public discourse may be what is necessary to reinvigorate the marketplace of ideas and reduce political polarization.

Access to the internet and the rise of social media has overloaded voters with information and exposed them to a proliferation of fake news. Using political budget cycles, or the tendency for politicians to increase the budget in run-up to elections to win more votes, as a proxy for misinformation, Fabio Padovano and Pauline Mille show in new research that voters who score higher on the OECD’s  Programme for International Student Assessment and achieve a higher level of education are better able to hold politicians to account.

In new research, Arseniy Samsonov builds a model showing how having available to the public a multitude of media outlets and social media platforms would not help reduce misinformation from politicians. Rather, monopolistic power could enable these outlets to retain control over the narratives around the information that these politicians provide to journalists and platforms in exchange for publicity and coverage, thus reducing misinformation.

Will increasing the liability of internet platforms mitigate disinformation? Economists weighed in on the effects of limiting or repealing protections for Big Tech through a recent survey from the Forum for the Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets—previously the Initiative on Global Markets—at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

In the March 30 episode of Capitalisn’t, Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales discuss the Twitter Files, why so much of the mainstream media has...

In response to rising concerns about political disinformation, governments have introduced a slew of interventions. Federico Vaccari warns in new research that these interventions...