Guy’s contribution begins:

Political disinformation, the subject of Rick Hasen’s latest book, Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons our Politics–and How to Cure it, is one of the most important and vexing problems currently facing American democracy.  The opening chapter of Rick’s book sets up the stakes.  Rick vividly recounts how Donald Trump created a maelstrom of misinformation, attempted to use weaponize the “Big Lie” to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election, and succeeded in convincing some of his supporters to violently attack capitol.

Though the stakes of false information and misinformation are high for democracy, Rick treats the issues of false and disinformation fairly and comprehensively.  Rick’s legal solutions are modest and measured.  No one can object to his calls for an improvement in election administration, more disclosure of those who fund on-line election activity, and using existing defamation law to deter those who make false statements about elections that injure the reputation of a person or entity. I would amend his proposal that the government ban empirically verifiable false speech about the mechanics of voting by applying such a law only to public officials, candidates, political parties, and the like.  Rick would apply the law to anyone who made a false statement about the mechanics of voting “whenever the statement is made on television, in a newspaper, or on social media, a website, or a messaging app.”  This strikes me as much too broad and unnecessarily so.  But the core of the idea, requiring public officials to be truthful about the mechanics of an election, strikes me as a reasonable one worth considering.  Perhaps Congress should amend 52 USC section 20511 along those lines.  Again, for the most part, with some minor exceptions, Rick’s solutions that rely on law are generally modest and largely unobjectionable.  Indeed, Rick is careful to emphasize the limits of law in addressing some of the issues raised by false information and misinformation. And his final chapter is devoted to an exploration of the possibilities of private ordering and the market.

On his own terms, there is very little to object to in Rick’s book. I do however wonder how we ought to think about the problem of disinformation and misinformation if we assume that the market for political information is operating efficiently and that the problem is not one of market failure, which is how Rick frames the issue. Rick defines cheap speech as “speech that is both inexpensive to produce and often of markedly low social value,” (21) and frames it as a problem of political market failure caused by information asymmetry (30).  He uses as his model a pathbreaking paper by George Akerlof, the Nobel Prize winning economist, entitled The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.  In that famous paper Ackerlof explored how the information asymmetry between sellers and buyers with respect to the quality of certain goods might result in a market in which lower quality goods overwhelm high quality goods and in a reduction in the size of the market. For example, if you’re a buyer in the used car market, you can’t tell whether a seller is offering a reliable used car or a lemon, though the seller knows. To hedge the risk that you’re buying a lemon, you make a lower offer.  Potential sellers of quality cars are less likely to enter the market because buyers are unlikely to pay their asking price. The absence of sellers of quality cars leaves sellers of lemons in the market.  Buyers demand even greater discounts on used cars to hedge against the now even greater risk that they are buying a lemon.  This drives even more quality sellers from the market and the downward cycle continues….