At the marketplace of ideas. Information between truth and chaos.

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There's something ancient, or rather new. Thus we could begin a discussion on truth and politics in the first twenty years of this new century. It's a debate that exploded ten years ago, sealed by the choice of "post-truth" as the word of the year by the Oxford Dictionaries. It had much to do with what Ruth Marcus, in the Washington Post, called Donald Trump's "Post-Truth Presidency" and the populist propaganda for Brexit. Two phenomena that have undermined the relationship between truth and freedom in the two homelands of liberal thought. But while back then many deluded themselves that the phenomenon was induced, precisely, by the champions of populist propaganda of the new nationalist, identitarian right, today there is now an awareness that those leaders and their slogans were the epiphenomenon of a more profound, established, prevalent, perhaps irreversible change. The symptom, rather than the cause, of the new construction, at the beginning of this century, of political debate in a global digital public sphere without moderation or moderators. The pandemic—with the infodemic and conspiracy theories that characterized it—has further revealed the pervasiveness of the war on (scientific) truth, in contrast not only with the politics of governments but also with the policies designed by expert elites, as Tom Nichols has aptly captured, namely, the refusal to analyze the evidence-based relationship between policy instruments and objectives.

And then there is the real war, the one which, as American Senator Hiram Johnson is said to have said in 1917, has among its first victims the truth. The symbolic episode of these years is the Bucha video: a fake fact-checking, created by Russian propaganda, manipulates the Ukrainian video showing the corpses on the side of the road, generating the suggestion that the corpses are actually actors moving after the videographer's car passes . The lie of a fact-checker is the symbolic inversion of the new relativism. The invention of "alternative facts" – a term coined by Kellyanne Conway, then Trump's spokesperson – as a tool of political propaganda is now pervasive. And certainly, it is not a new fact. Walter Lippmann's essay, "Liberty and News," from a century ago, seems written today. The pages that Hannah Arendt dedicates to "Lies and Politics" and "Truth and Politics" are very relevant today. How surprisingly relevant are Michel Foucault's Californian lectures on the “parrhesia” of the ancient Greeks, put to the test by the “kolakes,” those we might today call neo-populists.

But in this ancient world, there is something new. And it is the digital ecosystem's undermining of the relationship between freedom (of expression) and truth (of facts) upon which we claimed to found liberal democracies. We entered this new century with a vast and ancient "conclusus" repertoire of reflections on the relationship between power and truth, on the one hand, and power and freedom, on the other. Knowing, as Arendt long advised, that it is typical of political power to erode both freedom and truth, and one in function of the other, reciprocally. The point that today requires us to reflect anew is to investigate the location and nature of "political power" in the relationship between freedom and truth forged by the digital public sphere. In other words, in our "conclusus" repertoire, freedom (of expression) is represented on the one hand as an antidote or limit to political power and on the other as a tool for selecting what Arendt calls the "truth of facts." Therefore, freedom of expression and the emergence of truthful facts act as a mechanism for disciplining political power in liberal democracies, and certainly not as a tool for its affirmation and maintenance outside of free, and therefore shifting, democratic consensus. But is this still the case in the digital public sphere? Has the expansion of free speech online, with the spread of disinformation and hate speech strategies, sublimated the relationship between freedom (of expression) and truth (of facts), strengthening our liberal democracies? In short, are "alternative facts" and social media hate campaigns targeting targeted populations—as US Vice President J.D. Vance argued in Munich—the best example of the proper functioning of liberal democracies, or do they rather constitute a novel threat?

To answer this question, we must return to the essay "On Liberty" by economist John Stuart Mill —one of the fathers of liberal thought—who, with Justice Oliver W. Holmes's famous doctrine, shaped a century of US Supreme Court decisions on free speech. Mill's thesis is that truth and falsehood must freely spread and interact, without limits other than that of not causing (social) harm. Indeed, falsehood is necessary for truth to assert itself in the free exchange of opinions and be supported by social consensus. Therefore, if for the apostle John, "the truth will make you free," for John Stuart Mill, it is freedom (of expression) that generates truth (of facts). Freedom as a tool for achieving the social purpose of truth. In Supreme Court Justice Oliver W. Holmes's version, the First Amendment to the US Constitution is based on the protection of the free "marketplace of ideas" for the pursuit of the greater good of truth, with the consequence that (negative) freedom must be protected from laws that compromise its space. This neo-Socratic thesis, however, is based on several assumptions that are rarely verified in the digital ecosystem: perfect rationality of speaker and listener in the free marketplace of ideas; absence of cognitive bias; absence of market power in accessing and disseminating information; political neutrality; and willingness to change one's mind. If even one of these assumptions is not verified, the marketplace of ideas' natural "tendency" toward truth is compromised.

For years, the rules governing radio and television pluralism were based on the principle that competition in the supply of information was a sufficient condition to protect the marketplace of ideas. More competition, more ideas in circulation, more freedom, greater convergence towards the truth. What the advent of the web, and especially social media, has taught us is that exacerbated competition in the supply of information has generated information chaos and the need for users to select information. And how does this selection occur? By using full rationality, Popper's falsification principle, or rather mental shortcuts and cognitive distortions (such as mental inertia, status quo bias, anchoring, and so on)? Selecting information is costly. And in a world filled with uncertainty about the quality and veracity of information, we find it convenient to save time and effort. Follow others who interact with us. Stop at the first suggestions from search engine browsers. Accept the responses of AI LLMs like ChatGPT or Perplexity. In the midst of information chaos, the algorithm simplifies our access to information, selecting information that most closely matches our preferences, as revealed by previous choices. The algorithm is sycophantic and conformist. It must stimulate our attention to the things that interest us. It must keep us "engaged" without wasting our time. Thus, in the chaos of information, we end up passively receiving information that confirms our previous view of the world, of how things are and how they should be. Digital algorithmic selection is the opposite of the exercise of doubt: it is the factory of confirmations. The answer to each question is the most appropriate answer "for us." And on most social media, the choice to select "trends for you" is predetermined: the world that interests you, described as you are interested.

What happens to this digital ecosystem of John Stuart Mill's "marketplace of ideas" if the agora we participate in is not the collective one of public debate, but one tailored specifically for us? The "marketplace of ideas" thus transforms into a "marketplace of truths," without any natural tendency or convergence toward truth. Indeed, with selection tools that seem designed specifically to allow alternative facts to survive, isolate them from counterarguments, and protect them from group conformity and echo chambers. These truths concern not only alternative facts about events, but also imaginary facts about people, ethnic and religious groups, gender identities, and so on. A fertile ground for isolation, hate speech, prejudice, and polarization. Paradoxically, contrary to what John Stuart Mill imagined, it is precisely the triumph of free speech online, mediated by social media algorithms, that distances us from the truth of the facts, and even from curiosity about their veracity. We feel informed. We feel confirmed in our ideas. We think of the digital ecosystem as a window onto the world, when what we think of as the world is a mirror that reflects and confirms our previous worldview. It follows that precisely when the greatest amount of misinformation we receive, the greater our confidence becomes that we've finally obtained the right information, that we've uncovered conspiracies, that we're finally immersed in the truth. And even in knowledge: the Dunning-Kruger effect is the cognitive bias whereby individuals with little expertise in a given field tend, thanks to information acquired online, to overestimate their knowledge capacity. Those who know little think they know a lot.

The misunderstanding between freedom and truth in the digital ecosystem is therefore not simply the result of information chaos and algorithmic selection. It is the result of the paradox whereby we believe our freedom is expanded and strengthened when exactly the opposite is actually happening. In short, it is not only the error that should be worrying, but the lack of humility to acknowledge it, the will to correct it, and the tools to overcome it. Public opinion today is formed (and shaped) in this new digital public sphere. But what is the relationship between public power, freedom, and truth? Or rather, what type of power is most congenial to this digital agora? Both Lippmann and Arendt raise the issue of the risks of public power controlling information technologies, or of information monopolization (market power). Thus, in their view, the manipulation of truth goes hand in hand with the limitation of freedom of expression by those who wield power (political and/or market power). In the digital ecosystem, the opposite occurs: it is the dynamics of freedom of expression, in algorithmic intermediation, that manipulate the truth through disinformation strategies. This leads to questions about the relationship between power and truth in digital society. Where does this power lie? Who holds it? What message does it promote? How does it impact the formation of public opinion and political choices?

For Hannah Arendt, "freedom of expression becomes a farce if factual information is not guaranteed and if the facts themselves are called into question." Therefore, it is not enough to evoke, as Mill did, the marketplace of ideas for freedom to lead to truth. That freedom, to be authentic, must be expressed starting from shared, not "alternative," facts. It is therefore the truth of the facts that makes freedom of expression authentic, and not the latter that leads, in the free marketplace of ideas, to truth. This paradigmatic inversion of the relationship between freedom (of expression) and truth (of the facts) contains the answer to those, like US Vice President Vance, who criticize the EU's extremely difficult approach to regulating online platforms in countering strategies of disinformation and hate speech for political purposes. The right to inform and to be informed is not enough. Freedom of expression must also be defended through the right not to be misinformed. Which means, for example, control over the use of one's data for algorithmic profiling, control over one's algorithmic digital space, transparency about sources, labeling of AI-generated content, and so on. But it also means transparency about advertising revenue and the advertising promotion that occurs on digital platforms, which sell space and measure their audiences, without external public audits. Protecting freedom of expression from misinformation in this way is not censorship, as the very platforms that expelled Trump after January 6, 2021, claim. On the contrary, censorship today lies in the deception of online free speech, the manipulation of which we fail to discern, simply because it feeds us the information and worldview we desire to be true. As Demosthenes said, "Nothing is easier than to deceive oneself. For what a man desires, he also believes to be true." But in this search for the desired truth, in this illusion of freedom, even our democracies risk perishing.

Antonio Nicita is an economist and senator for the Democratic Party. His article continues Il Foglio's summer series dedicated to truth. Each week, a different author will examine this fundamental concept from the perspective of a specific discipline: law, mathematics, astrophysics, economics, politics, information, or theology. "Truth, in Practice" by Michele Silenzi was published on July 15th, "Truth in the Bar" by Giovanni Fiandaca on the 22nd, "What Truth for the Polis" by Flavio Felice on the 29th, "We Need a Bestial Physics" by Marco Bersanelli on August 5th, and "Who is the Guardian of the Truth" by Marco Li Calzi on the 12th.

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