The first panel, on Trusted Communicators, is up, at JournalOfFreeSpeechLaw.org; we'll be posting the other panels over the next several days. Here's the Introduction, by both of the editors:
The internet has remade both the media and the social institutions that surround the media. Speech was not cheap in the twentieth century. News organizations had to buy newsprint, paper, distribution networks, transmitters, spectrum licenses—all kinds of things that cost much more than a Facebook page—if they wished to reach an audience. But the few news organizations that could cover these costs held a safe market position, and from this perch, they wielded a great deal of epistemic and moral authority in their communities. They became "gatekeepers" with the power and the responsibility to decide what information, and what claims, were fit to print. Much of media law, and particularly First Amendment law, seems to have developed around the assumption that news organizations could and would play this gatekeeping role, and that the government should therefore rarely need to.
That world is gone. Competition from the internet and social media has decimated the business model that underwrote the twentieth century's gatekeepers. And those twentieth-century media institutions that have survived disruption—institutions such as the New York Times or the major television networks—are in no position to play gatekeeper. News consumers mostly get whatever flavor of "news" they wish, and individual speakers mostly decide what kind of speech is fit to post. There are gatekeepers in this environment, but they are institutions like Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube that bear little resemblance to yesterday's news giants and that wield their power in ways that lack any clear twentieth-century analog. The law is only beginning to catch up.
This project gathers sixteen scholars in law, media, technology, and history to consider these changes together. We divided into four groups of four, with each group considering one broad facet of the situation. The Essays gathered here as a symposium will ultimately be published as a book through Cambridge University Press, Media and Society After Technological Disruption.
