Julie Cohen’s contribution to the Balkinization symposium on my Cheap Speech book begins:

Rick Hasen’s timely and important book links disinformation-based strategies for election manipulation to the platform-based, massively intermediated information infrastructures that enable them. This essential contribution comes at a time when policymakers are, finally, paying systematic attention to platforms as sources of democratic vulnerability. They are not, however, paying attention in quite the right way, and Hasen’s exposition suggests some important policy shifts. In particular, as Hasen recognizes, strategies that regulate audience targeting, drawn from the privacy governance toolkit, can (and should) supplement the traditional election law toolkit.

Mechanisms for audience targeting are not the only platform feature of concern, however. Platform-based, massively-intermediated information systems are continually, iteratively optimized to amplify content based on its ability to drive user engagement—and, therefore, to privilege outrage and volatility over deliberation, reasoned contestation, and truth production. Although these systems were not designed for the principal purpose of undermining democratic governance, their affordances invite and amplify disinformation-based destabilization attacks to which democratic political systems are particularly ill-equipped to respond. Systems thinking about disinformation-based strategies for election manipulation requires attention not only to tools for audience design but also to the affordances that amplify destabilization attacks.