Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I’m skeptical that that’s, in fact, how YouTube and Twitter behave, that they take things down because Facebook takes something down. I’d also say, look, it’s complicated. There are things that come down because there are good reasons to take them down. Yes, as I said, I think one should be concerned with market concentration and market power. One should be concerned if there is speech that should be proliferating but isn’t. One should be concerned that the decision-makers are private actors. One should also be concerned with the harms of certain kinds of speech and the ways in which those harms can be amplified in the social media context. One should be concerned about the particular rights of the platform. These are private companies, but also have their own views about what their speech environment should be. There are a number of other factors that count in addition to whether some particular piece of content should get spread. Now, you’ve argued in the past that there’s no constitutional right to privacy, and I think I agree with everything you have written on the topic. But if I introduce a new angle, I’m wondering if I agree with you. Right now, facial and gait surveillance are much more prominent than when you wrote your original articles. If someone said, “Well, I’m worried about facial and gait surveillance.” These are genuinely infringing upon a right to privacy, in the literal sense of that term, that’s much more literal than the other context where the right to privacy has been invoked. Would you still say there’s no right to privacy? Well, I don’t think there’s no right to privacy. I think that the Supreme Court no longer grounds the sorts of things that we associate with the constitutional right to privacy in a right to privacy. We think of that in terms of birth control and abortion rights, and that is no longer the language and hasn’t been for many, many decades — hasn’t been the language that the court uses. There’s no right to privacy in a descriptive sense. I do think privacy is an important value to people. When it’s being infringed by private actors, there are other important values that are also relevant, namely, the economic rights of the private actors. If we’re talking about government surveillance, I’d want to know, why is the government surveilling? What is the value that it’s serving? Is it ham-handed? What are the possibilities of abuse? Could it achieve these objectives in some way that doesn’t involve the privacy infringement? I think privacy is a right and should be treated in the same way as other rights.…

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