Freedom of Information Choice

panel 2: Epistemic Integrity and the Problem of Misinformation Private companies are increasingly shaping the social and epistemic interactions between individuals. Such information curation may lack legitimacy when harming people’s epistemic autonomy. We should hence reconsider what epistemic autonomy should mean in these contexts. In this paper, I set out to re-define the needed epistemic autonomy in terms of the information options offered to people. Additionally, the information provided online often includes misinformation and harmful content. This may warrant regulation of online content. However, legitimate interventions require no disproportionate harm to people’s epistemic autonomy. That also requires knowing what change to information options would harm people’s epistemic autonomy, which I set out to determine. I explore an overlooked aspect of freedom of choice, which I term “freedom of information choice”. This is the freedom to choose the information one uses to form evaluative judgments, essential for epistemic autonomy. I elucidate two distinct characteristics of freedom of information choice. First, it cannot be measured primarily based on pre-existing evaluative judgments. Additionally, instead of the monetary budget set commonly used for economic freedom, in its evaluation, we should primarily consider what I term a “cognitive budget set”. The cognitive budget set is based on an analogy to the “monetary budget set” commonly used to describe economic freedom, which is a set of sets; the set of all bundles of commodities that can be jointly purchased given one’s budget. Likewise, the cognitive budget set is the set of all bundles of information options that can be jointly consumed given the limitations of one’s cognitive budget. Using the cognitive budget set for assessing this freedom allows uncovering harms to freedom of choice that arise even when people theoretically have vast amounts of options, due to cognitive biases and limitations. I clarify why these distinctions render prominent suggestions for enhancing freedom of choice insufficient. Subsequently, I propose a new way of enhancing freedom of information choice by increasing what I term the “intra-bundle diversity of options”. This involves enhancing the diversity of information within jointly possible combinations of information (i.e., within the same bundle) instead of diversifying between mutually exclusive options. What makes information options jointly accessible in my account is that they can be jointly consumed within the limits of a person’s cognitive budget. This measure can improve on typical problems with online information consumption. I illustrate how intra-bundle diversity can be achieved by highlighting a distinct quality of the cognitive budget set, which is the sensitivity of cognitive costs to the order of information consumption. These results also explain why information design that has been shown to cause polarization reduces epistemic autonomy and offers recommendations for online regulation.