Mercato delle idee e fake news. Note su un problema di esternalità negative nell’ambiente digitale

The spread of fake news in the digital arena has put into question the traditional idea of the self-regulation of public debate: the well-known metaphor of “free market of ideas”. Because of the availability of digital media, the reduction of the overall cost in producing and disseminating false news has dramatically fallen. Everybody at any time can enter the public debate, even though with bad arguments. At the same time, the competition between traditional and digital media has produced an astonishing reduction of the average incomes of the professional journalists. This paper aims to bring to the fore the metaphor of the market of ideas, metaphor that has been used in the US for reducing the extent of public regulation of medias. After a short introduction about historical the genesis of the “free market of ideas”, the article to show the usefulness of the concept, by highlighting the notion of “failures of the market”, which occur in the digital arena and two possible remedies