Cheap Speech and What It Has Done (to American Democracy)
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CHEAP SPEECH AND WHAT IT HAS DONE (TO
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY)
Richard L. Hasen*
INTRODUCTION
In a remarkably prescient article in a 1995 Yale Law
Journal symposium on Emerging Media Technology and the
First Amendment,' Professor Eugene Volokh looked ahead to
the coming Internet era and correctly predicted many changes.
In Cheap Speech and What It Will Do, Volokh could foresee the rise
of streaming music and video services such as Spotify and
Netflix,2 the emergence of handheld tablets for reading books,3
the demise of classified advertising in the newspaper business,'
and more generally how cheap speech would usher in radical
new opportunities for readers, viewers, and listeners to custom
design what they read, see, and hear, while concomitantly
undermining the power of intermediaries including publishers
and bookstore owners.'
To Volokh, these changes were exciting and
democratizing. Volokh's predictions were not perfect-for
example, he expected we would be using high-speed printers to
print out columns from our favorite newspaper columnists,' and
he grossly underestimated how cheap speech would wreck the
economics of the newspaper business.' He also could see some
dark sides to cheap speech, such as the Internet lowering the
organizing costs for hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.' But
Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science, UC Irvine School of Law. An
earlier version of this article was prepared for delivery at Distorting the Truth: 'Fake
News' and Free Speech First Amendment Law Review symposium, University of
North Carolina School of Law, October 27, 2017. Thanks to Joe Birkenstock, Bruce
Cain, Erwin Chemerinsky, Sarah Haan, David Kaye, Brendan Nyhan, Ann Ravel,
Eugene Volokh, Sonja West, and symposium participants for useful comments and
suggestions, and to Julia Jones for excellent research assistance.
1 Eugene Volokh, Cheap Speech and Whatlt WillDo, 104 YALE L.J. 1805 (1995).
2 Id. at 1808-18; see also id. 1831 (What people would like, I believe, is to choose
from home-at any time convenient to them-any TV show or movie they want, just
as they choose a book in a bookstore, only more conveniently and less expensively
(or even free, since the medium might still be advertiser-supported).).
3Id. at 1823.
4 d. at 1841-42.
SId at 1848-49.
6Id. at 1820-21.
Id. at 1842 (The loss of classified revenues, coupled with the cost savings and
opportunities for extra profits from electronic distribution, should help push
newspaper publishers into going electronic . . .. [E]ach electronically delivered
newspaper will have ads calculated to fit the particular subscriber's profile-age, sex,
and whatever other information the newspaper gets at subscription time, or can
deduce from the mix of stories he's ordered.).
' Id. at 1848.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/falr16&div=15&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Cheap Speech and What It Has Done (to American Democracy)
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