Chapter 7 - The Digital ‘Marketplace of Ideas’: The Need for a Human Rights-Centred, Multi-stakeholder Approach to Cyber Norms

Summary

Introduction

The study of international relations has long focused on the strategic interactions of governments – games of war and treatises of peace. But increasingly in today’s globalised world, collective action crosses national boundaries and critical decisions that affect the world of politics fall to non-state actors, be they individuals, terrorist groups, grassroots movements or corporations. As Anne-Marie Slaughter describes in her apt analysis, practitioners and students of international affairs would benefit from seeing the world not as a chessboard of strategy games between statesmen, but as a web of networks, overlapping and intersecting worldwide and online (2017, 5–7). To understand action and reaction in the twenty-first century, one must now grapple with an entirely new space where neither state nor non-state actors exercise full control: the internet, whose infrastructure increasingly determines how information is consumed and decisions are made. This chapter discusses new challenges to the exercise of democracy and human rights in the international arena, brought on by the increasing ubiquity of online fora where modern public discourse takes place.

Freedom of expression is a key component of both democratic and human rights frameworks. Its regulation online has become subject of great discussion, both because of non-democratic regimes that seek to limit dissent and information online, and due to increasingly concerning disinformation and hate speech within social networks worldwide. Foundational to the liberal principle of free speech is the oft-invoked image of a ‘marketplace of ideas’. The concept dates back to nineteenth-century political philosophers like John Stuart Mill, who argued that in an unfettered space where the public could freely debate and weigh competing ideas without interference, rational human behaviour would allow the ‘best’ ideas to be chosen and exercised in society (see Mill, 1989, Part 2). Yet many scholars, including Mill himself, have discussed the imperfections of such an image, as the marketplace can be distorted by real-life conditions that create ‘market failures’, such as censorship, human bias towards the status quo and the historical evidence that the rationality of a human mind is not infallible (Ingber, 1984, 4–6). Distortions alter the ability of a rational individual to identify and act on an objectively best option or identify truth.