The Public Choice Argument Against Speech Regulation

With Brazil’s decision to ban X in the news, there’s renewed interest in the question of whether governments should prevent the spread of misinformation, particularly online. It’s good if people have accurate information so that they can make competent decisions at work, in the marketplace, in the voting booth, and more. So one might think that the state should play a role in filtering out the misinformation that can appear in your social media feed.

But the lessons of public choice economics should make us wary of authorizing the state to regulate speech. Rather than model political actors as wise and benevolent guardians of the public interest, we should recognize that they’re constrained in a variety of important ways. For instance, they’re limited both in their impartiality and their information. As an example, a politician may seek to restrict trade to benefit domestic producers, not because it’s good for the economy as a whole, but because it gives them an electoral advantage.

Similarly, state actors authorized to regulate speech have incentives to regulate in ways that advance their own personal interests at the expense of the public. Imagine the following case: a high-profile partisan social media account posts that the spending of the current presidential administration is the highest in US history. Suppose this claim is false if we’re talking about inflation-adjusted spending, but true if we’re not adjusting for inflation. Is this misinformation? It’s hard to say and this isn’t the place to sort out that debate. But the worry is that the administration in power has a strong incentive to censor it as misinformation even if it shouldn’t. The post isn’t exactly flattering and so censoring it serves the administration’s political interests. In fact, we don’t even need to posit any selfish motivations here—people are just better at finding problems with claims made by outparty members. Although we might want to authorize ideally rational and impartial political actors to decide what we may and may not read, no such political actors are available and so we should curb our enthusiasm about speech regulation.