Nabiha Syed
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
And I'm the president of The Markup, a nonprofit news organization that investigates big tech.
And one of the first things she told me was that one of the problems with the marketplace of ideas is that there's... No reckoning for the fact that some people have bigger platforms than others, meaning their ideas get heard first.
Their ideas are also, you know, surrounded by joiners who are like, that idea is popular.
You know, not that all things in the American Muslim experience boil down to a single day in 2001, but to the extent that, like, the aftermath of 9-11 was formative, it was because I felt like there was all of a sudden a narrative about who I was that was playing out in the media.
Orange County, Pakistani, like Kardashian-esque life, right?
Like I just didn't, I was like, who are these people?
But here's the thing to remember, like the marketplace of ideas was one theory, right?
And it's the idea that really took off because a variety of social platforms were like, yep, that's the one.
You should know, is the well in your neighborhood poisoning you?
This view conceives of like the rights of a listener, not just the rights of a speaker.
The way that we do things now, we focus a lot on who gets to talk.
Like if you're listening to all these people talk, do you have a right to accurate information?
And you see some glimmers of that throughout American history.
You know, you have to present both sides of an issue.
You have to provide facts on these different sides of issues.
We should start from the vantage point of the facts and information you need to participate in democratic deliberation, which could be local, which could be national.
But we're going to focus on information health, not just the right of someone to speak.
The marketplace of ideas has been such a beautiful idea and it served us for about a century.
And maybe it's time to think about what a different theory could look like.