Speech, Sorting, and Discovery

A prominent way of conceiving of, and defending, a robust right to free speech is the marketplace of ideas. The speech environment improves both because of the ultimate victory of good arguments over bad and because the participants become increasingly sophisticated evaluators of arguments. Here I would like to focus on what happens to a marketplace of ideas model when there is no longer a single market. Multiple simultaneous speech markets have a variety of interesting properties that we may wish to consider in contrast to a single discussion, especially in their capacity to accommodate diversity. However, the very thing that can make multiple conversational communities so valuable—the ability for niche communities to vigorously engage in the issues that most interest them, freed from having to find ways of working them into a broader conversation—can also lead to dysfunction in the mechanisms that Mill relies on to generate the benefits of free speech. Two core liberal rights—free speech and free association—can combine to make speech less effective at allowing better arguments to surface. Lastly, I consider approaches for recovering the benefits of a robust speech environment, even when it is split across multiple epistemic communities.