Madison and Shannon on Social Media

The Internet has changed speech, and our traditional understandings of speech regulation are struggling to adapt. This article argues that the Internet has tipped the quantity of information that individuals are exposed to beyond the point which they are able to meaningfully process. This article draws from a range of fields— from Information Theory, to cognitive psychology, to informatics—to provide both empirical and theoretical support for the idea that there is a limit to how much information individuals can meaningfully process and that we have surpassed that limit. This argument poses a direct challenge to bedrock First Amendment concepts such as the marketplace of ideas and the mantra that “the best response to bad speech is more good speech.”