Marketplace Of Ideas Research Articles

A positive future for futures and foresight science needs fierce competition in the marketplace of ideas: A commentary on Fergnani and Chermack 2021

A positive future for futures and foresight science needs fierce competition in the marketplace of ideas: A commentary on Fergnani and Chermack 2021

Fundamental Rights Protection Online: Curation v. Regulation?

Technology has transformative power – and it is generally a power for good. Knowledge transfer is cheaper and more accessible than ever before thanks to our increased connectivity. With the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, online teaching and videoconferencing served as substitutes for in-person meetings. Moreover, the virtual environment allowed for broader audiences to follow various events. While many believe that virtual interactions cannot fully replicate the physical world, not least since blue-collar jobs remain firmly rooted in the physical, the quick takeaways from the global health crisis (still ongoing at the moment of writing) are that the world did not stop spinning for one reason only: physical contacts could in many cases be creatively and effectively replaced by the use of the internet. The internet has also ostensibly created preconditions for unprecedented democratization of the public sphere, possibly a true “marketplace of ideas” or at least an open forum for the exchange of information providing the means for individuals to seek, receive and impart ideas, regardless of frontiers. By enhancing access to information and freedom of speech, the internet has also become a significant source of citizen empowerment and engagement, transforming the role of citizens, both in their private and public lives. In spite of all the excitement however, would today’s technical infrastructure lead to an actual democratization of knowledge spurring a possible decrease in social inequalities? Isn’t the marketplace of ideas an imperfect market just as any other? Can it give rise to the proliferation of disinformation and lead to new forms of censorship; can it inflict grave harm? Through the prism of fundamental rights, this book collection aims to engage with the broader questions framing the debate on online content curation while also looking at the legal nuts and bolts underpinning it.

Free speech case offers valuable reminders to other institutions

The notion that higher education is a marketplace of ideas is deeply rooted in case law and popular understanding of the campus climate. Increasingly, however, higher education has become subject to claims that the sector is ideologically driven in one direction, with conservative causes, speakers, and groups being marginalized by a pervasive liberal dogma on campuses across the country. Immigration reform, affirmative action, the Second Amendment, the #MeToo movement, support for President Trump, structural racism, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett all serve as examples of current topics that have called into question the extent to which minority or dissenting viewpoints are permitted or supported in higher education.

New digital methods in a polluted information landscape

Fake news, or what is now more accurately termed information disorder, is an increasing problem. However, the ‘infodemic on the pandemic’ also highlights a related issue: the problem of fraudulent science and its amplification through social media and questionable scientific publishing practices, particularly deceptive or predatory publishing. This paper reports how insights gleaned from a critical digital pedagogy, and new work on the verification of sources, can help students and early career researchers navigate the ‘polluted’ information landscape that has become a ubiquitous feature of our online world. As embodied in the module ‘Critical Thinking in an Age of Fake News and False Accounting’ which is part of the University of Liverpool’s International Summer School, it shows how commonplace and easily accessible ’Open Source Intelligence Techniques’ (OSINT) like reverse image searching and geolocation can be used to develop a more critical perspective on what constitutes reliable sources of information. The research seeks to establish the degree of awareness students have of these techniques and whether they use them in their academic life. It thus contributes to existing initiatives on academic integrity and the digital goals embodied in new curriculum developments. The paper also asks deeper, more speculative questions about the strategic amplification of disinformation and its relationship to Miltonian ‘market place of ideas’ conceptions surrounding knowledge and understanding.

The Marketplace of Ideas and the Problem of Networked Truths

The Marketplace of Ideas and the Problem of Networked Truths

Priam's Folly: United States v. Alvarez and the Fake News Trojan Horse

In legal scholarship over the past few years, fake news has been criticized and pondered repeatedly. In many ways, 2020 was a year of reckoning which brought to the fore the myriad problems posed by fake news. This Article uses the context of 2020 to critique the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Alvarez, the latest Supreme Court ruling on the issue of whether fake news is protected by the First Amendment. Alvarez was decided in 2012, before the true dangers of fake news during the Internet Age were made fully apparent to the public. While Alvarez upheld the noble idea of truth ultimately triumphing in the marketplace of ideas, in reality, Alvarez opened the gates to the pernicious dangers posed by fake news.

Hybrid Reality: The Rise of Deepfakes and Diverging Truths

While the manipulation of media has existed as long as their creation, recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have expedited the range of tampering techniques. Pictures, sound and moving images can now be altered and even generated entirely by computation. We argue that this development contributes to a “hybrid reality”, a construct of both human perception and technologically driven fabrications. In using synthetic media involving deep learning, called deepfakes, as one manifestation,we show how this technological progress leads to a distorted marketplace of ideas and truths that necessitates a renegotiation of democratic processes. We synthesize implications and conclude with recommendations for how to reach a new consensus on the construction of reality.

Hybrid Reality: The Rise of Deepfakes and Diverging Truths

While the manipulation of media has existed as long as their creation, recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have expedited the range of tampering techniques. Pictures, sound and moving images can now be altered and even generated entirely by computation. We argue that this development contributes to a “hybrid reality”, a construct of both human perception and technologically driven fabrications. In using synthetic media involving deep learning, called deepfakes, as one manifestation,we show how this technological progress leads to a distorted marketplace of ideas and truths that necessitates a renegotiation of democratic processes. We synthesize implications and conclude with recommendations for how to reach a new consensus on the construction of reality.

Hybrid Reality: The Rise of Deepfakes and Diverging Truths

While the manipulation of media has existed as long as their creation, recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have expedited the range of tampering techniques. Pictures, sound and moving images can now be altered and even generated entirely by computation. We argue that this development contributes to a “hybrid reality”, a construct of both human perception and technologically driven fabrications. In using synthetic media involving deep learning, called deepfakes, as one manifestation,we show how this technological progress leads to a distorted marketplace of ideas and truths that necessitates a renegotiation of democratic processes. We synthesize implications and conclude with recommendations for how to reach a new consensus on the construction of reality.

Hybrid Reality: The Rise of Deepfakes and Diverging Truths

While the manipulation of media has existed as long as their creation, recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have expedited the range of tampering techniques. Pictures, sound and moving images can now be altered and even generated entirely by computation. We argue that this development contributes to a “hybrid reality”, a construct of both human perception and technologically driven fabrications. In using synthetic media involving deep learning, called deepfakes, as one manifestation,we show how this technological progress leads to a distorted marketplace of ideas and truths that necessitates a renegotiation of democratic processes. We synthesize implications and conclude with recommendations for how to reach a new consensus on the construction of reality.

Communicating stakeholder resilience: understanding how resilience discourse can build a fully functioning society

ABSTRACT Resilience is an ongoing sensemaking process that relies on communicative interactions – including those that occur between stakeholders and organizations – in order to understand and respond to a given adversity. Resilience communication is enacted through discursive processes that align with the tenets of fully functioning society theory (FFS). In order to integrate these two theoretical frameworks, we completed a qualitative content analysis of AARP’s #DisruptAging campaign. In doing so, we found that the campaign provided information about age/aging in a way that countered commonly held stereotypes about older adults at multiple-levels (e.g., individual, organizational, societal). The processes of resilience were reflected in the organizational discourse, as was a new strategy – acceptance/appreciation. These findings illuminate the societal role of organizational discourse by showing how inclusive organizational-public communication can disrupt meta-narratives and enrich the marketplace of ideas, and thus contribute to the building of a fully functioning society through (re)constructing the meanings of resilience on individual, organizational, and societal levels.

Holmes's Other Metaphor

For nearly seventy-five years, the “marketplace of ideas” has been regarded as the central metaphor of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dissent in Abrams v. United States and of free speech theory in general. No other image has so captured the public imagination or generated such fierce academic argument. But there is another metaphor in Holmes’s dissent that may offer a better framework for understanding his view of free speech – the metaphor of the experiment. In this symposium essay marking the centenary of Abrams, I explore the implications of the experiment metaphor, explaining what Holmes might have meant by it and how it might complement and improve upon the metaphor of the market.

Offline: Managing the COVID-19 vaccine infodemic

If you read News Punch (aka “Where mainstream fears to tread”), you will be familiar with a series of articles about the prospects for a COVID-19 vaccine. With headlines such as “Big Pharma Exec: We Are Exempt From COVID-19 Vaccine Liability Claims”, the website has published report after report casting doubt on the integrity of vaccine science and even the likelihood of a vaccine becoming available. You will find similar pieces on other websites, such as Infowars and AlterNet. The arguments these articles peddle seem deliberately designed to sow uncertainty. Elon Musk is alleged to have said that he won't allow his children to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Executives from one vaccine manufacturer are alleged to have sold “millions in stock as Covid vaccine trials enter phase 3”. Doctors are accused of demanding the US Government punish Americans who refuse a COVID-19 vaccine. These stories may be having an effect. Last month, Nature Medicine published the results of a survey describing the views of over 13 000 people across 19 countries. 14·2% of the respondents completely or somewhat disagreed with the statement that they would accept a COVID-19 vaccine if generally available. 17·9% completely or somewhat disagreed with the statement that they would accept a COVID-19 vaccine if their employer recommended it. In many countries, vaccine hesitancy is sufficiently high to render community immunity a challenging goal. The survey suggests that far too little has been done to prepare the public for the arrival of a COVID-19 vaccine. Misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines is a serious threat not only to public health but also to national economic security—a fact made all the more urgent as a second wave of coronavirus sweeps across Europe. In their 2019 book, The Misinformation Age, Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall explain how false beliefs persist and spread. They emphasise the social character of fake news. The connections between us in groups or networks enable the propagation of misleading evidence as well as true beliefs. Models of communication show the importance of trust in shaping the spread of beliefs. The greater the distrust among those with different views, the greater the risk of permanent polarisation. We are also prey to conformity bias—a desire to agree with others and to trust the judgments of others. Our predilection to conformity makes it harder to stand against the crowd. If your network holds strong anti-vaccine views, you may find it more difficult to arrive at your own independent judgment, even if you are inclined to have confidence in a vaccine. And misinformation is made worse when there are active propagandists spreading fake news. The field of COVID-19 vaccines is full of propagandists seeking to manipulate and mislead. What can be done? Although not writing about COVID-19 specifically, O'Connor and Weatherall draw conclusions that can be applied to our present predicament. A warning: they stress that anyone who thinks the “marketplace of ideas” will sort fact from fiction is dangerously mistaken. First, then, social media companies, especially Facebook and Twitter, must do more to police their networks and eliminate false information about a potential COVID-19 vaccine. Second, trusted politicians from all political parties (and other public figures) need to speak out in support of COVID-19 vaccine science. Third, vaccine scientists (and editors of scientific journals that publish vaccine science) must raise their standards for the work they do (and publish). O'Connor and Weatherall argue that scientists need to build trust by abandoning industry funding. That isn't going to happen for COVID-19 vaccine trials. But it is important that scientists retain maximum independence from manufacturers who sponsor their studies. It doesn't help the cause for a COVID-19 vaccine when pharmaceutical company executives talk encouragingly about a vaccine. Propagandists use their words to fuel distrust about vaccine science. Fourth, journalists should avoid the unwitting spread of misinformation. They should never give any kind of platform to vaccine sceptics. Fifth, lawmakers can do more to regulate sources of misinformation, just as they have done for other threats to health, such as tobacco. O'Connor and Weatherall's central claim is that “We need to recognise fake news as a profound problem that requires accountability and investment to solve.” COVID-19 vaccine misinformation is not taken as seriously as it should be. That complacency needs to end.

The financial market of ideas: A theory of academic social media.

Millions of scholars use academic social media to share their work and construct themselves as legitimate and productive workers. An analysis of Academia.edu updates ideas about science as a 'marketplace of ideas'. Scholarly communication via social media is best conceptualized as a 'financial market of ideas' through which academic value is assigned to publications and researchers. Academic social media allow for the inclusion of scholarly objects such as preprint articles, which exceed traditional accounting systems in scholarly communication. Their functioning is based on a valorization of derived qualities, as their algorithms analyze social interactions on the platform rather than the content of scholarship. They are also oriented toward the future in their use of data analytics to predict research outcomes.

„Prawo do prawdy” w perspektywie filozoficznoprawnej. Przyczynek do dyskusji

W opracowaniu opisano fenomen „prawa do prawdy” w ujęciu statycznym i dynamicznym. Pierwsze z nich dotyczy norm aktualnie obowiązujących, drugie — prawa, którego charakterystyka dopiero się kształtuje na gruncie filozofii prawa. W prawie międzynarodowym przedmiotem prawa do prawdy jest należna ofiarom wiedza na temat rażących naruszeń praw człowieka dokonanych w przeszłości. Na szczeblu krajowym ustawodawca zakłada, że jawność informacji o działaniach władzy jest niezbędna do efektywnego funkcjonowania mechanizmów demokratycznych. Autor, opierając się na klasycznej teorii prawdy stworzonej przez Arystotelesa, próbuje udzielić odpowiedzi na pytanie, czy liberalna koncepcja „rynku idei” jest wciąż adekwatnym mechanizmem do ochrony tej wartości, a jeżeli nie, to czy ochrona prawdy powinna stać się na większą skalę funkcją prawa publicznego? Prognozuje, że w niedalekiej przyszłości rozwinie się teoria prawa publicznego reali-zującego postulat ochrony prawdy w życiu społecznym i pojęcie to przestanie być jedynie wyrazem pewnej idei czy metafory.

A Darwinian Approach to Postmodern Critical Theory: Or, How Did Bad Ideas Colonise the Academy?

This article proposes a Darwinian approach to examine the persistence and resilience of a peculiar set of misbeliefs that have flourished in intellectual circles over the last several decades. These misbeliefs, such as the prevailing antirational explanatory models within postmodern critical theory (PMCT), might be expected to perish under the weight of critical scrutiny; that is, selection pressures would tend to weed them out in a highly competitive and rigorous “marketplace of ideas” such as the academy. Given the flourishing of PMCT and its attendant communities of practice, political economies, tribalism and social signalling, it is suggested here that it should be approached in a new way: as a significant socio-cultural cluster of misbeliefs worthy of explanation with tools honed via evolutionary science. For example, the prominence of religious-like performativity and self-validating arguments associated with PMCT makes it suitable for study from perspectives such as memetics, evolutionary psychology (EP) and signalling theory, and Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). With these approaches, a hypothesis-driven research agenda could be developed to examine the deeply-rooted cognitive basis and adaptive socio-cultural drivers behind the spread of PMCT. It is proposed that formal and systematic programmes be established to research the phenomenon, and that – just as with the study of religion – we move beyond the now long-established emphasis on intellectual critique and instead establish a broad programme in the Evolutionary Studies of Postmodernism (ESPM).

Destiny and conditionality: the ameliorative pragmatisms of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Fukuzawa Yukichi

O artigo desenvolve uma hermenêutica comparativa dos “mundos da vida” da América do Norte continental e do círculo Pacífico do Japão Meiji através de uma interface das articulações protopragmáticas de Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) e Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901). Ainda relevante no mercado de ideias atuais, The Young American (1844), de Emerson, e Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1875), de Fukuzawa, foram possibilidades melhorativas pioneiras da modernidade meritocrática na civilização pós-patriarcal e pós-feudal.

Freedom of speech, freedom to teach, freedom to learn: The crisis of higher education in the post-truth era

With increasing influence of illiberalism, freedom should not be considered or interpreted lightly. Post-truth contexts provide grounds for alt-right movements to capture and pervert notions of freedom of speech, making universities battlefields of politicised emotions and expressions (Peters et al., 2019). In societies facing these pressures around the world, academic freedom has never been challenged as much as it is today (Gibbs, 2019). As Peters and colleagues note (2019), conceptualisations of ‘facts’ and ‘evidences’ are politically, socially, and epistemically reconstructed in post-truth contexts. At the same time, with intelligence commodified, reified or marginalised, freedom of speech and of mobility can entail fights for entitlements, or escapes from local responsibilities (Calitz, 2018; Lo, 2019). The decline and corruptions of democratic free speech and academic freedom, or the absence of forces to defend them, are thus serious challenges. These challenges grow as the competition of ideas, sometimes under the rubric of academic freedom, often implies the power struggle and questioning of statuses in the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’. Competition as a value invoked in some conceptualisations of freedom, becomes more important than human dignity, which was originally supposed to expand and strengthen under democratic conceptions of freedom in higher education (Macfarlane, 2016). What had been happening to freedoms, of speech, teaching, and learning, across different subject positions and cultures of higher education, remains largely underexplored, as alt-right movements, neoliberalism and illiberalism, and post-truthism values and orientations expand.

Is academic freedom feasible in the post-Soviet space of higher education?

The legacy of totalitarianism thwarts discourse and practice of academic freedom in post-Soviet universities. For legacy-holders, “academic freedom” causes disorientation, irresponsibility, demoralization and inequity. They see more threats than benefits from empowering decision-makers who are non-compliant with local bureaucracy. For innovators, freedoms enhance flexibility and creativity. However, granting such freedom also reinforces value clashes on campuses and tends to intensify feelings of guilt and shame in regard to actions which show a disrespect of authority and tradition. While both legacy-holders and innovators endeavour to redefine their practices and norms in their teaching, they appear to still struggle to shed their predispositions to a paternalistic and colonial philosophy of education. Presumably curative, their engagement with international networks of scholarship exposes their particular positions of vulnerabilities to that end. Both groups continue to push patriotism and cultural idiosyncrasy in order to hedge their power and status in the global marketplace of ideas. As in the past, a discourse of anti-westernization prevails, shoring up legacies of regulative thinking, indoctrination, and insularity. Progressive academics succeed primarily by taking bold steps to go above and beyond the dominant discourses and norms within their universities and policy-building communities. This article explicates why, in turn, a “surrogate academic freedom” tends to emerge as a conundrum across the post-Soviet higher education space.

More Donors, More Democracy

A country's democracy improves when it receives democracy aid from a larger number of donor countries.This finding appears surprising from a development perspective, as the presence of a large number of donors, and more generally 'fragmented aid', have been shown to impact negatively on the recipient country. But fragmented aid can be beneficial: Diversity on the donor side provides choice to the local actors involved in the process of democratization. It thus creates a 'marketplace of ideas' which increases the viability of the resulting institutions. In contraast, a highly-concentrated donor community can lead to the imposition of an institutional blueprint, designed in advance and not adapted to the needs of the recipient society. An instrumental variable analysis with panel data for 133 countries from 1994 to 2013, explicit tests of the causal mechanism, and anecdotal evidence from Ghana provide strong support for the benefits of diverse democracy aid.