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16 First Amend. L. Rev. 129 (2017-2018)
Ecosystem of Distrust

handle is hein.journals/falr16 and id is 146 raw text is: ECOSYSTEM OF DISTRUST Mark Verstraete & Derek E. Bambauer* ABSTRACT The Internet has famously democratized the information ecosystem. Online, everyone is a pundit: each participant can share news, analyze events, and opine. The analog system, by contrast, was one where incumbent intermediaries (frequently licensed by governments) performed a powerful, centralized gatekeeping function that largely regulated the creation and dissemination of news. Scholars have mostly welcomed the rise of the democratized, networked Fourth Estate. We argue that this transformation is not at all an unalloyed good. Moreover, in celebrating this technological revolution, commentators have neglected the role of cultural factors that tend to magnify the pernicious effects of a flattened information hierarchy. Distrust in social institutions has been on the rise since the Watergate crisis in the 1970s. While government has been the most obvious target of falling confidence, media entities and subject matter experts have also been increasingly the focus of skepticism. The advent of the Internet has magnified this effect: gatekeepers such as CBS and the New York Times are vilified when wrong and invisible when correct. Many eyes make media errors shallow. Moreover, traditional journalistic norms that require forthright admission of mistakes help reinforce narratives that portray the mainstream media as biased, incompetent, and out of touch. The current phenomenon labeled as fake news, and the older trend of conspiracy theories, are outgrowths of both the technological amplification of skeptical or nihilistic voices and the postmodern assault on information shibboleths. It is critical to realize that the Internet's initial promise of disintermediation was illusory: gatekeepers have not been eliminated, but merely replaced. The new breed of intermediaries operates with radically different financial incentives and professional norms than their predecessors did. While Facebook moderates and removes information on its ubiquitous platform for violations of amorphous community standards, the company's goal is not the production of truth, but rather the generation of increased traffic * Privacy and Free Expression Fellow & Professor of Law, University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. Thanks for helpful suggestions and discussion are owed to Jane Bambauer, Brett Frischmann, Helen Norton, Dan Hunter, and Thinh Nguyen. The authors welcome comments at <markverstraete@email.arizona.edu> and <derekbambauer@email.arizona.edu>.

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