Published: December 2024
Please note, this Topic Guide should be the starting point of your research. You are encouraged to conduct your own independent research to supplement your argument.
INTRODUCTION
On 24 August 2024, Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of instant messaging and platform service Telegram, was arrested at Le Bouge Airport on the outskirts of Paris, France. The charges were seemingly related to a lack of moderation on his platform and accusations that Telegram is complicit in cases linked to drug trafficking, support for terrorism and cyberstalking [Ref: Le Monde]. Durov was subsequently charged with 12 crimes in connection with Telegram’s failure to remove certain content at the request of the authorities.
Durov’s arrest is a world first, signifying a growing concern among Western governments about the spread of online misinformation and a move towards regarding social media platforms as publishers of user-generated content, thereby holding their owners responsible for that content. The only comparable case to the Durov arrest was in 2016, when a Brazilian judged ordered the arrest of a senior Facebook executive who was briefly jailed for refusing to hand over private WhatsApp messages to assist in a drug-trafficking case [Ref: Guardian]. However, he was quickly released, and many commentators branded the decision ‘hurried’, ‘unlawful’ and ‘extreme’ [Ref: Spiked].
The Durov incident is the latest in a long line of concerns over ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘hate speech’ and ‘fake news’ online. This concern has prompted a series of laws, from the EU’s Digital Services Act [Ref: European Commission] to the UK’s Online Safety Act [Ref: Gov.UK], as well as a range of investigations, task forces, court rulings, social-media bans and legislation around the world – all deemed to be tackling online misinformation [Ref: Poynter].
In November 2024, in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections, several high-profile media outlets and journalists began to take issue with Elon Musk’s social-media platform X for his alleged ‘Trump boosterism’ [Ref: Politico]. In the UK, the Guardian newspaper announced it would be removing its official editorial accounts on the platform (although users will still be able to share its content), stating: ‘The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.’ [Ref: Guardian] Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia made a similar move two days later [Ref: La Vanguardia], while the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Reporters without Borders took X to court in France for ‘letting fake news run wild’. [Ref: Politico]
In the United States, in 2021, laws were passed in the states of Texas and Florida that aimed to restrict social-media companies from removing certain political posts or accounts – largely those from a Conservative viewpoint – from their platforms [Ref: BRI]. However, the companies hit back by arguing that such laws are unconstitutional, conflicting with the First Amendment right for private companies to choose what they wish to publish on their platforms.
Does the proliferation of concerns about misinformation represent a threat to free speech? For some, it seems, tech companies are not doing enough to root out hate speech and other harmful online content on their platforms, which is damaging to democracy. For others, the idea that government should intervene in the policies of a private company is a dangerous precedent and does indeed restrict our free speech.
In addition, many worry at the new power of tech companies like Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), Twitter, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Amazon, arguing they have become a near-oligopoly on what can be seen and shared online and have the potential to shape the narrative or how we see the world. In a twist to the trend in recent years, it seems that Meta has accepted these concerns. In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, announced that the company would reduce the use of fact-checkers, who he said were ‘too politically biased’ and would ‘get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse’. [Ref: Guardian]
So, are tech companies simply private companies who should be able to self-regulate their practices, or does their market strength suggest they are, in fact, more like public utilities, whose power needs to be considered in a different way?
DEBATE IN CONTEXT
This section provides a summary of the key issues in the debate, set in the context of recent discussions and the competing positions that have been adopted.
With over 5,000 mainstream news articles published daily in the USA alone [Ref: ResearchGate] and around 4.5 million blog posts per day internationally [Ref: TechJury], information is more accessible than ever. This is seen by some as an ‘overabundance of information, both factual and false’ [Ref: BMJ]. Because of this, some argue it is harder than ever to distinguish between accurately presented fact and misinformation. As Ruth Marcus puts it: ‘With facts passé, the next inexorable move is to reduce all news to the same level of distrust and disbelief. If nothing is true, then everything can be false.’ [Ref: The Washington Post]. To some, this requires the intervention of tech companies to help us navigate an ever more chaotic, ‘post-truth’ [Ref: New Statesman] media landscape or, as former US President Barack Obama once put it, the ‘dust cloud of nonsense’ [Ref: Business Insider].
Born out of this new world of social media is the inevitable power social-media companies now hold. Given their place effectively controlling much of the supply of information, tech companies are said becoming more powerful than nation-states [Ref: Common Dreams] The possibility of affording such organisations even greater power to influence the flow of information worries many, particularly with the advance of artificial intelligence (AI), which was held by some to be ‘the digital risk to the 2024 elections.’ [Ref: LA Times]
Perhaps, however, social media has less influence than many assume. Documentarian Adam Curtis contends that we get ‘lost in the hysteria about it all’ and that while we search for the dystopian effects of social media, what we fail to investigate is the question of why ‘people really vote for Brexit and Trump’ [Ref: Idler]. For some, social media is curating the way we think, for others it is reflecting it.
However, there are many commentators who point out that, on many issues, it is the mainstream media, not social media who are curating the way we think. In addition, there have been numerous incidents of mainstream media spreading ‘misinformation’ For example, when the BBC, the New York Times and several other outlets reported that Israelis had bombed a hospital in Gaza [Ref: The Atlantic]. That ‘fake news’, they argue, had catastrophic effects on the international reaction to the war in the Middle East and to Jews around the world, setting off a chain of anti-Semitic protests and attacks.
In addition, some journalists and commentators suggest that there have been many instances of news that is simply not reported in the mainstream. People turn to X and other social-media platforms, they argue, precisely because these institutions can no longer be trusted to report the truth [Ref: The Spectator] or when they seem to be engaged in curating a narrative that excludes certain news from being reported [Ref: Spiked]. For such commentators, it is the free flow of information on these social platforms that allows the mainstream media to be corrected when they have misled the public.
But social-media platforms are not immune from the charge of ‘narrative curation’ themselves. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Meta (the parent company of Facebook) removed the Russian state-backed broadcaster RT from its platforms [Ref: Independent]. Posts from RT.com on Twitter (now X), which had been already labelled with the tag ‘Russia state-affiliated media’, were removed and replaced with a notice of ‘Account withheld’. [Ref: Twitter]
In some instances, both the mainstream media and social-media platforms have been found to have suppressed news and information in unison. During the coronavirus pandemic, the ‘lab leak theory’ – that the Covid-19 virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Technology rather than being passed from live animals at a nearby market – was roundly condemned as a ‘conspiracy theory’ [Ref: Vox] with articles in the press as well as comments and posts on social-media channels being censored. Yet, there is now a growing body of opinion which points to the fact it is a credible theory, indeed that there is a ‘highly likelihood’ this was the source of the outbreak [Ref: Telegraph].
Who to trust?
These arguments have led to fears there is ‘Reality Crisis’ [Ref: New York Times], that we can no longer tell fact from fiction as a society. There are many debates on who gets to decide what is misinformation and what is not.
Legislation has been created in both the UK and the US in an attempt to curb the power of tech companies: the UK’s Online Safety Act, which came into force in October 2023 [Ref: gov.uk], and the US’s Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) [Ref: congress.gov]. But some fear such laws will lead to greater restrictions on adult free speech and violate the First Amendment by ‘enabling the federal government to dictate what information people can access online and encourage social media platforms to censor protected speech.’ [Ref: UCLA]
So, should tech companies be required to prevent online misinformation from circulating? Who decides what is misinformation and what is not? Who should regulate the online world? Should governments intervene or should platforms self-regulate? Does regulation risk restricting free speech online or do platforms have a duty to protect their users?
The difficulty in drawing a line
One issue some people have with tech companies’ attempts to stop online misinformation is the potential for political bias to affect what is or is not deemed unsuitable. There is no simple line between genuine comment and supposed misinformation. Instead, there is a range of content that often gets branded as misinformation, from innocent parody through to genuinely manipulative content [Ref: Visual Capitalist]. If you cannot draw a simple distinction, then many worry that political bias will creep in.
However, defenders of intervention cite the fact that both Facebook and Google have been using independent, third-party fact-checkers to avoid bias [Ref: Facebook], although Meta has recently announced that it will end this. [Ref: Meta] Despite this, instances of censorship of legitimate articles have plagued social media. For example, an article from the news website UnHerd that was critical of the World Health Organisation was censored by Facebook for being misinformation, despite containing none [Ref: UnHerd]. Furthermore, when Twitter (now X) attempted to de-politicise its advertising, it resulted in oil companies being allowed to claim natural gas was stopping global warming while stopping climate groups from posting advertising that countered these claims [Ref: MSNBC].
Advocates of tech-company intervention argue this is no reason to stop trying to fight misinformation altogether. As time goes on, they argue, the technology will improve and, even if it is never perfect, it is worth occasionally blocking content in error in the interest of stopping the huge levels of misinformation we see tearing apart our society today [Ref: Mashable].
The right to free speech vs the danger of misinformation
Critics of intervention argue that for tech companies to interfere with the content people post online is to infringe on people’s right to freedom of speech. Social-media platforms like Facebook and X have grown to a point where they are the default forums for public debate. Following on from the writing of JS Mill, it is often argued this freedom of expression is foundational to democracy and progress [Ref: Alexander Meiklejohn]. A faith in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ [Ref: Document Journal] leads opponents of tech company intervention to believe that truth and goodwill prevail when ideas are left to themselves to compete in the public realm. Freedom, therefore, is a requirement to allow people to think, explore and argue. Restriction hampers social progress.
This is countered by writer George Monbiot, who argues, ‘in a marketplace, you are forbidden from making false claims about your product’ [Ref: Guardian]. Using the context of vaccine misinformation, he goes on to argue that, considering the regulation we place on financial and goods markets: ‘We protect money from lies more carefully than we protect human life.’ For commentators like Monbiot, we need central control of what can and cannot be said to protect us from dangerous lies.
However, advocates of free speech argue that imposing any restriction to speech from above could end up causing greater social damage than allowing misinformation to roam freely. Callum Baird warns censorship is a ‘Pandora’s box’ that could lead us down a road where it is very quickly socially acceptable for a ‘small set of powerful groups seeking to protect themselves’ to filter public discourse [Ref: Newsroom]. No guarantee of truth is inherent in any restrictions of speech.
Baird insists that all restrictions on free speech are effectively slippery slopes, with small restrictions logically leading to ever more oppressive and authoritarian ones, with no better chance of seeing truth. Moreover, more recently, it was revealed that a leading ‘misinformation expert’ had himself used non-existent sources, potentially generated by ChatGPT, to defend a new law banning election misinformation in Minnesota [Ref: Minnesota Reformer]. Such cases appear to support those who argue restrictions on ‘misinformation’ are about narrowing the public square of debate and ensuring certain viewpoints cannot be shared.
A tool for protecting orthodoxy?
However, those who support restrictions also argue that narrative curation is the aim – and it is, in fact, the free speech advocates who are distorting the trust. According to Emily Bazelon of the New York Times, free speech concerns are a façade for something more sinister. ‘A crude authoritarian censors free speech. A clever one invokes it to play a trick, twisting facts to turn a mob on a subordinated group’ [Ref: New York Times]. From this view, those defending misinformation are often reactionaries who want to keep regressive ideas in the realm of public acceptability. Free speech is less a marketplace of ideas than a risk of poisoning the well.
One common argument is that even if one has the right to free speech, this does not mean the right to a platform where you can broadcast your thoughts to the world [Ref: The MIT press reader].
Tech companies, it is argued, are merely private organisations and can take decisions they choose to improve the quality of their platforms. However, opponents insist that tech companies act increasingly like oligopolies, able to crush opponents ‘associated with the wrong political ideology’ [Ref: Glenn Greenwald]. As one free-speech group puts it: ‘If you are prevented from speaking on the digital public square by a corporation, is it materially different from being prevented from speaking in the physical public square by government?’ [Ref: Free Speech Champions] Treating Facebook or Twitter simply as private companies allows them to act ‘as enforcers of new rules for the public square’, which means we ‘are forfeiting constitutional protections and major aspects of self-governance’ [Ref: The Atlantic].
Who decides where the boundaries lie?
Should the government decide what constitutes misinformation and compel tech companies into action? There are plenty of cases in which the government could be argued to have spread misinformation itself, for example the so-called ‘Dodgy Dossier’ [Ref: Guardian] produced by the UK government in 2002 to justify the Iraq War in 2003.
Should tech companies continue to intervene at their own discretion? Even Twitter’s former CEO admits it sets a ‘dangerous precedent’ [Ref: Guardian] when tech companies try to control the content on their platforms and they may likely push themselves further from the ‘healthy conversation’ they pursue.
To work this out we need to answer: at what point does something become misinformation? How and at what point does misinformation cause harm? And who, if anyone, has the right to draw that line and carry out measures against it?
ESSENTIAL READING
It is crucial for debaters to have read the articles in this section, which provide essential information and arguments for and against the debate motion. Students will be expected to have additional evidence and examples derived from independent research, but they can expect to be criticised if they lack a basic familiarity with the issues raised in the essential reading.
FOR
Opinion: There’s a clear way to regulate Facebook, TikTok and other social media
Anika Collier Navaroli and Ellen K. Pao LA Times 20 March 2024
Schools to wage war on ‘putrid’ fake news in anti-extremism crackdown
Nick Gutteridge Telegraph 10 August 2024
In 2020, Disinformation Broke The US
Jane Lytvynenko Buzzfeed News 6 December 2020
Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them
George Monbiot Guardian 27 January 2021
AGAINST
The government has withdrawn its misinformation bill: a philosopher explains why regulating speech is an ethical minefield
Elimende Inagella/Unsplash The Conversation 25 November 2024
Labour’s war on free speech is the real threat to public life
Frank Furedi The Times 14 August 2024
Online extremism: Censorship isn’t the solution
Callum Baird newsroom 23 February 2021
How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler
Glenn Greenwald Substack 12 January 2021
IN DEPTH
What does Free Speech Mean?
Free Speech Champions
Should spreading anti-vaccine misinformation be criminalised?
Melinda C Mills & Jonas Sivelä the bmj 17 February 2021
Adam Curtis: Social media is a scam
Tom Hodgkinson Idler 3 February 2021
Twitter’s Trump ban is more important than you thought
Paul Waldman Washington Post 18 January 2021
We’re better without Trump on Twitter. And worse off with Twitter in charge.
Zephyr Teachout Washington Post 14 January 2021
The President “Shouts Fire” and Two Social Media CEOs Respond: What Happens Next?
Denali Sagner Issue Voter 28 July 2020
Facebook Restricts Speech by Popular Demand
Daphne Keller The Atlantic 22 September 2019
Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government
Alexander Meiklejohn 1948
BACKGROUNDERS
Useful websites and materials that provide a good starting point for research.
Fact checking on Facebook
Facebook DOA: 1 April 2021
Ditching of Facebook factcheckers a ‘major step back’ for public discourse, critics say
Robert Booth Guardian 7 January 2025
How Many Blogs Are Published per Day in 2021?
Bobby Chernev techjury 29 March 2021
The AI-Powered Fact Checker That Investigates QAnon Influencers Shares Its Secret Weapon
Matt Binder Mashable India February 2021
How To Spot Fake News, Visualized in One Infographic
Omri Wallach Visual Capitalist 10 February 2021
Twitter launches Birdwatch, a fact-checking program intended to fight misinformation
Kim Lyons The Verge 25 January 2021
Bias-aware news analysis using matrix-based news aggregation
Felix Hamborg, Norman Meuschke & Bela Gipp Research Gate June 2020
With fact-checks, Twitter takes on a new kind of task
Elizabeth Culliford & Katie Paul Reuters 30 May 2020
Has the internet broken the marketplace of ideas? Rethinking free speech in the Digital Age
Cody Delistraty Document Journal 5 November 2018
Fake news handed Brexiteers the referendum – and now they have no idea what they’re doing
Andrew Grice The Independent 18 January 2017
Why in the post truth age, the bullshitters are winning
Laurie Penny New Statesman 6 January 2017
When all news is ‘fake,’ whom do we trust?
Ruth Marcus The Washington Post 12 December 2016
This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook
Craig Silverman Buzzfeed News 16 November 2016
Obama: Fake News on Facebook Creates ‘Dust Cloud of Nonsense’
Alex Heath Business Insider 7 November 2016
Iraq dossier drawn up to make case for war
Richard Norton-Taylor Guardian 12 May 2011
FURTHER READING
How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis
Kevin Roose New York Times 2 February 2021
The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation
Emily Bazelon New York Times 13 October 2020
Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump
Twitter 8 January 2021
The year Big Tech became the Ministry of Truth
Fraser Myers Spiked 28 December 2020
Facebook’s incompetent censorship
Douglas Murray UnHerd 12 February 2021
Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison Guardian 17 March 2018
Fake News – Statistics & Facts
Amy Watson statista 5 May 2020
What Facebook’s Australia news ban could mean for its future in the US
Kari Paul Guardian 27 February 2021
Twitter thinks ads about climate change are bad. Big Oil’s disinformation is fine, though.
Emily Atkin MSNBC 4 February 2021
Charities condemn Facebook for ‘attack on democracy’ in Australia
Emma Graham-Harrison Guardian 20 February 2021
AUDIO
Tech Censorship And Independent Media, with Glenn Greenwald and the CEOs of Parler and Substack
The Megyn Kelly Show 13 January 2021
Misinformation Wars: who fact-checks the fact-checkers?
Battle of Ideas festival 19 October 2023