Cass: You could imagine a company thinking,
"Maximizing shareholder value is basically what we want to do,
and the best way to do that is to create an information cocoon."
Michael: I'm Michael Barone, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute, and I'm
here today with Prof. Cass Sunstein, University professor at Harvard Law School, formerly
professor at the University of Chicago Law School for many years, director of the Office
of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget in the White
House from 2009 to 2012 during the Obama administration.
Prof. Sunstein has written more than a dozen books, or at least they've been published,
and his latest is "#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media."
So Cass Sunstein has been at AEI and spoken and participated in a number of programs over
many years.
We welcome him here once again as a friend of AEI and a person from whom we learn, and
what's the message in your book sir?
Cass: Well, the basic message is that echo chambers and information cocoons are a real
problem for democracy.
It's very important for people to step outside a kind of hall of mirrors which they can construct
with the aid of Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, and encounter both topics that are unfamiliar
and maybe not especially interesting to them, and certainly points of view that aren't congenial
and that may be disruptive to what they already think that is central to, let's say, the American
project.
Michael: Where you talk in the book about Bill Gates's vision in his, I believe, 1995
book, you can have a "Me" environment, I don't know if Mr. Gates pointed out to what some
of the downsides of that are that you're talking about.
Was this foreseen 20 years ago?
Cass: I bet, by some of the visionaries, of which Mr. Gates is certainly one.
So some people saw it 20 years ago and they basically celebrated it.
They thought that you're not gonna have a "Network" or the "Wall Street Journal" anymore,
that they were wrong in thinking we wouldn't have those things, but they were right in
saying that their role would be very different.
So what they foresaw was, instead of picking up the "Wall Street Journal" or instead of
looking at "The network," you would be able to construct what some people called "The
Daily Me" which meant a completely personalized encounter with the screen or with your computer
or tablet.
And that would mean that if you celebrated, let's say, Sen. Sanders, you could just have
a Sanders world and see everything that reflected views that were congenial to him.
Or if the only issue that interested you really was, let's say, what's happening with the
budget?
You know, that would be a pretty unusual person whose only interest is the budget.
But if that was your interest, you could just sort yourself into a world where it's budget,
budget, budget, budget.
And the early view in 20 years ago, 15 years ago was, "Whoa, that's phenomenal.
People can get exactly what they want."
Michael: Do we have metrics, numbers that tell us to what extent the world has changed
from that period in the mid-1990s when people were celebrating the Me world?
Cass: We do.
And they suggest, the most dramatic I think, is the numbers showing what percentage of
people get a lot of their news from their Facebook newsfeed, and it turns out that number
is quite substantial.
It's over 20%.
It changes of course every month and it's demographically inflected in the sense that
young people tend to get a very significant proportion of their news from their Facebook
newsfeed.
We also have numbers about whether people on Twitter are following points of view that
are basically theirs and whether they are cross-posting or interested in stuff that's
different.
We also get a sense from Facebook of the extent to which people are clicking on stuff that
is consistent with their current views or whether they are being 'algorithmed,' I just
invented a new word, 'algorithmed.'
Michael: A verb.
You made it into a verb.
Cass: Yes.
I'm not so proud of that invention.
Nonetheless, it is an invention.
People who've been algorithmed into material that is creating an echo chamber.
And the data is supportive of the view that there is some algorithmisation.
Michael: Is there any movement back in the other direction?
Cass: Not empirically.
I think what could be said to challenge the echo chamber hypothesis is that there are
a lot of people who...first, there are a lot of people who are curious and who are not
sorting themselves into "The Daily Me."
A lot of people, you know, they may be Republicans but they're kind of interested in what the
Democrats are saying, either because they wanna see what foolishness there is or because
they think they may have something helpful to say or informative to say.
And Republicans and Democrats, there are a lot who are doing both of those things.
So the existence of human curiosity is vindicated by the data that we see, and it's also the
case that it's challenging to defend the proposition that people are self-sorting more on the internet
than they do with respect to, say, television or ordinary face to face.
Michael: You get very different politically conflicted audiences for Fox News on the one
hand, MSNBC on the other.
That's been a phenomenon that's been apparent for at least a dozen years or more.
Am I right?
Cass: Completely.
And in the old days where people got their information from their newspaper, it might
be that in the town, you'd have one newspaper that had an identifiable perspective and another
had a different one.
So while the problem of echo chamber creation is really serious online, it isn't clearly
wrong to say that it's historically just been with us and it's not worse than it was.
I believe in certain ways it is worse than it was and the data supports that, but it's
more important on one view to say that it's a problem than to say that it's worse now
than it was six years ago.
Michael: Let me suggest that we to put something in historic perspective.
We've been talking about the last 20 years, the last 30 years, a dozen years, but if we
look at the longer run in American history, what you might say is that we had a period
where we had sort of universal media because of technological development, and it was often,
in the case of broadcast media, regulated media, in the movies, it was regulated by
the Hays Code for a long period of time, internal regulation.
So from, let's say the Radio Act of 1930 which started federal regulation of radio and then
television, to the abolition by the FCC, of the Fairness Act, something you argue was
on balance a good thing in 1987.
Cass: Actually not.
I'm opposed to the Fairness Doctrine.
Michael: No, that you said the abolition was a good thing.
Cass: Yeah.
Michael: That you had this sort of universal medium that appealed to everybody, you know,
a couple of radio networks, three television networks, a few movie studios.
It coincides with the period of the career of Ronald Reagan who made his living in the
universal media of radio and movies and television.
And that's the exception.
You go back to Jacksonian America, the George Washington administration, the Civil War.
You have a much more partisan media.
You have people seeking their partisan media.
There is a book a Smithsonian curator, John Grinspan, called "The Virgin Vote."
It's about people may have big celebrations of young men going to cast their first vote
and they've reached age 21, and they would remain partisans of their party, almost like
Steelers' fans or Cowboys' fans, remain partisans of their teams.
We lived for that for a long time, not without some problems.
Do you think there are some similarities that might be instructive between that period and
this?
Cass: You're making a great point.
I think it is true that the period where the, as it's sometimes called, the general interest
intermediaries, kind of a road high, whether it's a network or the daily newspaper, is
relatively narrow in the arc of American history and that the current age has more similarities
to what preceded it than we'd normally think.
Michael: And we got a civil war out of that, among other things.
Cass: Yeah.
I hope we're gonna get that with this.
What I'd say is different about this age than that age is the extreme ease with which you
can find a zillion like-minded people who will fortify the view that you're inclined
toward.
And in the pre-internet era, as in the pre-TV-radio era, you could find a community of people,
but the community either would be not that big or would just have, by virtue of how geography
works, a degree of diversity.
Now, along some issues, you know, the what produced the civil war, you might not find
a whole lot of diversity in some areas in the south or in the north on who's right.
But on many questions that confronted the nation, to find yourself communicating with
a huge number of people who think exactly like you do, that's hard.
With our current technology, you can do that basically in less than a second.
Michael: Less than a second.
I mean, I'm thinking back to the period of the 1850s, very confusing to us election freaks
because you get new parties, old parties disappearing, big changes.
You get the agitation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the issue of slavery in the territories,
the formation and response thereto of the Republican Party all within about six months.
That happened.
You have Horace Greeley's "New York Tribune" being circulated around the northern parts
of the country being suppressed by postmasters in the South.
That moved faster than we think of it.
They didn't wait for mules to make their way across the country.
Cass: I'll tell you kind of the beating heart of the concern of the book.
In 2016, over 40,000 people died on America's roads.
That's an increase over 2015 and that's an increase over 2014.
Now, what are we gonna do about that?
Our infrastructure in the United States for a country of this capacity is, and President
Trump is completely right on that, it's highly problematic.
Whenever you think about the immigration situation, it's not ideal, and there are a number of
things that could be done to improve it that in principle are just the right things to
do.
We have a number of poor people in the United States, it's a lot lower than it could be,
but who are struggling with a terrible educational system that give their kids weak prospects.
We don't have the level of intergenerational mobility that we would like and that fits
our official and completely admirable creed, which is, in America anyone can make it, whoever
your parents are.
The data doesn't suggest that's true.
Now, those are concrete problems each of which has a potential solution, and the solution
to each of them has been rendered much more difficult by virtue of the kinds of polarization
that social media are feeding.
So if you think that the word "regulation" is like the word what, "bet."
We're bet.
It's alphabet.
It's not bet.
If you think the word regulation is short for job killing regulation, then the idea
of doing something about some of these issues would seem preposterous because a regulation
is a job killing regulation.
Or if you think the system is rigged so anything that hurts people who are wealthy is like
a good idea, then you're not gonna be making much progress.
So the problem that I'm focused on is premature death, poor life prospects, basic public goods
that aren't being improved.
Now, don't get me wrong, the United States is on balance doing fantastically by world
standards and historical standards, but the echo chamber and information cocoon problem
is a contributor to our inability to...
Michael: It's impeding rather than facilitating.
Cass: Absolutely.
Michael: Here, what are the solutions?
I mean, "#Republic," you advanced some modest proposals, I think it's fair to say.
Describe what, if anything, we can do.
You don't talk about actual government regulation of the internet as how we should do it.
Cass: No, I don't want that.
This is not a cheerful book.
So I did, before this, a book on "Star Wars" that's a really happy book.
This is a more downbeat book and, to identify the problem is the goal of the book, not to
press on, hurray, we have solutions.
And it's important to think that...to know that some problems just don't have solutions,
or they don't have solutions that the identifier of the problem can see yet.
Having said that, there are a few things that we can do.
So the providers of information, whether they are MSNBC or Fox News or Facebook, can work
in a way that counteracts rather than promotes the problems we're describing now.
And Facebook, to its credit from its public pronouncements, and they are immensely important
in terms of Democratic governance now, they've become that, they are clearly rethinking the
core values described in their newsfeed in 2016, where in 2016, the idea was, "We're
gonna give you what exactly interests you."
Which seems beautiful, but it's "The Daily Me."
It's the...that you're going to be algorithmed basically.
They are now rethinking that.
Now, two ideas that would be on the list of proposals are, why not give Facebook users
an Opposing Viewpoints button where they can just click and then their newsfeed is gonna
show them stuff that they don't agree with.
Or why not give Facebook users a Serendipity button where they can just click and if they
click, then they're gonna get stuff that is just coming to them through an algorithm which
provides people with a range of stuff.
So if you're someone who is just focused on one set of issues, you're gonna get the "Wall
Street Journal" and "New York Times" also.
And Facebook, to its credit, doesn't wanna pick winners and losers, so they shouldn't
promote one particular newspaper, but they could have a random draw of things, maybe
it could be geographical.
So those are two ideas that Facebook could use and you could see analogies that any provider
of information to a large group of people provides.
You know, you're right to say that I have had an involvement with AEI over the years,
and one thing that AEI does is, there's a range of views at AEI and provided by AEI.
And you can think of many organizations that have a commitment to doing that.
Even if, in the case of Fox News or MSNBC, they kind of know who their people are.
Michael: One of the proposals that you advance as a voluntary proposal is that people who
are attacking or criticizing or taking opposite position for mothers on the internet might
start off by saying, "What's right about your opponent?"
You're sort of asking for manners.
But isn't there a danger that even if you give them a nudge, they won't budge?
Cass: Yeah, definitely.
So you could imagine a company thinking, you know, now that we're talking about private
sector entities, that our first obligations is to our shareholders and maximizing shareholder
value is basically what we're gonna do, and the best way to do that is to create an information
cocoon which makes people cozy or inflamed or whatever, and it maximizes your...I taught
at the University of Chicago, as you mentioned, maximizing shareholder value is something
that companies legitimately focus on.
But the hope is that many providers of information, A, think that there are more than one way
to maximize shareholder value or maybe get close to that, and also think that, well,
maximizing shareholder value is a priority.
There are a few other things that we're interested in.
And if you're Facebook, which is doing great, you might think maximizing shareholder value,
yes, being part of a self-governing society, also yes, and we're gonna try to accomplish
those.
We're gonna try to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Michael: Well, I wanna thank you Cass Sunstein for sharing time with us here at AEI and give
another plug for your book "#Republic."
It is, what, your 13th, 14th, 15th book that you've published?
Cass: There are too many.
I can't count that high.
I was an English major.
Michael: Okay.
Well, thanks very much for being with us today.
Cass: Thank you so much.