Don’t Shoot the Message: Regulating Disinformation Beyond Content

Clara Iglesias Keller

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2021, vol. 18, issue 99, 486-515

Abstract: This paper approaches regulatory strategies against disinformation with two main goals: (i) exploring the policies recently implemented in different legal contexts to provide insight into both the risks they pose to free speech and their potential to address the rationales that motivated them, and (ii) to do so by bridging policy debates and recent social and communications studies findings on disinformation. An interdisciplinary theoretical framework informs both the paper’s scope (anchored on understandings of regulatory strategies and of disinformation) and the analysis of the legitimate motivations for states to establish statutory regulation that aims at disinformation. Departing from this analysis, I suggest an organisation of recently implemented and proposed policies into three groups based on their regulatory target: content, data, and structure. Combining the analysis of these three types of policies with the theoretical framework, I will argue that, in the realm of statutory regulation, state action is better off targeted at data or structure, as aiming at content represents disproportional risks to freedom of expression. Furthermore, content targeted regulation shows little potential to address the structural transformations on the public sphere of communications that, among other factors, influence current practices of production and spread of disinformation.

Keywords: disinformation; regulation; regulatory strategies; fake news; digital platforms; desinformação; regulação; estratégias regulatórias; fake news; plataformas digitais (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/246740/1/F ... -Don_t-shoot-the.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:246740

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().