Should governments regulate what is shared on social media to prevent the spread of fake news? (Horizon Academic ‘25)
Awarded the Gold Prize (0.5%, Top 10 of 1952 essays) for the Horizon Academic Essay Prize 2025
Photo Credits: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/37928821857967459/
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties" (Milton). In John Milton’s Areopagitica, the poet turned civil servant argues vehemently against censorship, asserting that the freedom to express and debate ideas – however controversial, disputatious, and uncensored they are – is fundamentally paramount to human liberty and a democratic society (Bakalar 585). Four centuries later, the tools of communication have evolved from hand presses and paper to tweets, hashtags, and livestreams. Yet, in today’s digital era where information can be viewed instantaneously by millions of people worldwide with the click of a button, does Milton’s argument for the free marketplace of ideas still stand?
This essay points to the affirmative. In this essay, I argue that governments should not regulate what is shared on social media to prevent the spread of fake news for two main reasons. Firstly, government regulation of social media cannot be free of partisan bias, resulting in the undermining of democratic legitimacy and free speech. Secondly, regulation fails on its own terms as it is unfeasible and ineffective.
Firstly, government regulation of social media cannot be free from partisan bias and inevitably results in politically motivated censorship. Although “fake news” is an objective term referring to news that convey “wholly false”, “inaccurate” or “deliberately misleading information” (Bakir and McStay 154), when a government claims sole authority to characterize what constitutes “fake news”, the objective label becomes a normative, malleable weapon against dissent and political opposition; in this way, political actors are able to utilize the term to undermine information that contradicts their political agenda to maintain political control. Thus, the regulation of certain media as “fake news” is a powerful tool for authoritarian regimes: Political sociologist Dr Maxim Alyukov writes that “by pre-emptively debunking alternative information”, citizens are “less able to attribute responsibility for the regime’s policies” (Alyukov).
The swiftness of which the boundary between fact-checking and political suppression erodes can be seen in Turkey’s 2022 “disinformation law”. Marketed as a bulwark against “fake news”, Turkish authorities passed a legislative package that would sentence people who “spread information that is inaccurate” in a way that would “create fear, panic”, or to disrupt the country’s domestic security, to 4-5 years in prison (Aydıntaşbaş). Crucially however, the government itself decides what counts as “misleading.”. For example, government statistics stated that the country’s inflation rate was 83.45%, but many journalists and economists claimed that it was actually 186% (Aydıntaşbaş). Under the new legislation, these people and watchdog agencies would be held liable, banned, and imprisoned, effectively outlawing objective economic reality checks. Reporters have already been arrested and detained for reporting on soaring food costs and depreciation of the Lira, while news sites face throttling or shutdown orders until “corrections” align with state figures (Kabis-Kechrid). By redefining contested statistics as fake news, authorities both punish critical inquiry and insulate fiscal policy from scrutiny. First-Amendment scholar Nadine Strossen echoes this, stating that “No matter how great the potential harm of the speech, the potential harm of censorship is even greater” (Franklin Pierce School of Law). Thus, the Turkish case illustrates how swiftly a law framed as anti-disinformation can become a legal cudgel against accountability, demonstrating that when governments monopolise the definition of truth, empirical debate and the ideals of democracy itself are placed at risk.
Secondly, government regulation fails on its own metrics due to the sheer scale and borderless nature of the medium, making government regulation impractical and redundant. This is evidenced by legal philosopher Rick G. Morris’s surveys of two centuries of broadcast controls; he found every wave “fraught with difficulty, ineffectiveness, discrimination, and failure,” (Morris 58) a pattern that modern platforms only magnify because “technology thwarts the possibility of accurate assessment or control” (Morris 58). Facebook’s own experience illustrates the challenge of regulation: despite hiring 15000 moderators to combat fake news, the company still fights against “two billion posts per day in a hundred languages,” (Morris 64) an impossible volume for any ministry to vet without sweeping up lawful speech or missing viral lies. Moreover, governments cannot outsource regulation to artificial intelligence softwares as filters can inherit the prejudices of their training data and can be “affirmatively fooled” (Morris 95). Hence, these structural challenges show that government regulation would consume vast monetary and manpower resources that could be put towards education or infrastructure, and yet still fail to properly suppress fake news.
Meanwhile in the status quo, systems that address how fake news spreads already work without state censors. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok employ Third-Party Fact-Checking intermediaries to regulate content (New America). Simultaneously, the EU’s Digital Services Act mandates “very-large” social media platforms to publish their disinformation risk assessments and provides open-source data to researchers. Thus, it can be seen that better tools already exist to tackle fake news than government regulation. Using a cost-benefits analysis, I argue thus that the costs of government regulation – in its tendency towards partisan bias and undermining free speech – far outweigh its limited benefits, especially when viewed comparatively against the EU’s proven, less intrusive alternative.
In conclusion, governments regulating what is shared on social media to prevent the spread of fake news is neither desirable nor feasible. Government regulation inevitably results in politically motivated censorship, while the sheer amount of online sites make enforcement a Sisyphean task. A more effective, forward-facing model would be targeting the systems that drive disinformation, rather than regulating the social media sites – enhancing anti-disinformation campaigns to cultivate students and citizens’ ability to spot fake news, passing legislation that requires large social media platforms to be transparent about their algorithms, and promoting independent, rapid-response fact checking across social media platforms. Thus, governments need not, and should not, regulate social media.
Bibliography
Bakalar, Chloé. “The Virtues of Everyday Talk: The Enduring Significance of John Milton’s Theory of Expressive Liberties.” Political Theory, vol. 49, no. 4, 2021, pp. 584–612. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27116994.
Bakir, V., & McStay, A. Fake News and the Economy of Emotions: Problems, Causes, Solutions. Digital Journalism, 6(2), 154-175. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1345645.
Yaraghi, Niam. “Regulating Free Speech on Social Media Is Dangerous and Futile.” Brookings, 21 Sept. 2018, www.brookings.edu/articles/regulating-free-speech-on-social-media-is-dangerous-and-futile.
LibGuides: Fake News: What Is Fake News? libguides.exeter.ac.uk/fakenews.
Aydıntaşbaş, Aslı. “Turkey’S New Media Law Is Bad News – but Don’T Report It.” Brookings, 18 Oct. 2022, www.brookings.edu/articles/turkeys-new-media-law-is-bad-news-but-dont-report-it.
Esen, Berk. “Turkey’s New Disinformation Law: An Alarming Trend Towards Cyber-Authoritarianism.” Stiftung Wissenschaft Und Politik (SWP), www.swp-berlin.org/publikation/turkeys-new-disinformation-law-an-alarming-trend-towards-cyber-authoritarianism.
L. Kabis-Kechrid et al. "Human Rights in Türkiye: Freedom of Expression and the Right to Liberty and Security in 2021/2022." Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law Online (2023). https://doi.org/10.1163/22112987-20230045.
et al. "A Contextual Inquiry of The International Fact-Checking Network and Factuality on Social Media." (2021).
Law, Franklin Pierce School Of. “First Amendment Scholar Nadine Strossen: ‘No Matter How Great the Potential Harm of the Speech, the Potential Harm of Censorship Is Even Greater.’” Franklin Pierce School of Law, 7 Nov. 2024, law.unh.edu/blog/2024/11/first-amendment-scholar-nadine-strossen-no-matter-how-great-potential-harm-speech-potential-harm.
“Everything in Moderation.” New America, www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/everything-moderation-analysis-how-internet-platforms-are-using-artificial-intelligence-moderate-user-generated-content/case-study-facebook.
