Thank you, Ela Özcan, for such a tough question! I’ll do my best to break it down and give you the best answer I can.
Online misinformation is a pretty hot topic: it intoxicates political debate, radicalizes people with different opinions against each other, and distracts them from what is actually going on in the world. On social media the spreading of fake news is much more pervasive, as it is more difficult to recognize as fake and spreads faster than one can fact-check it.
However, I fear that making the sharing of misinformation online a criminal offence would have very undesirable consequences and be very difficult to implement as a concrete policy. I am also skeptical about whether it would make the online world a better place.
First, let’s deal with the question: Would it be possible to make spreading misinformation a criminal offence? There are many problems one would face when trying to make sharing fake news illegal. There is, first and foremost, a general issue regarding freedom of speech, one of the cornerstones of democratic society. Every citizen has the right to express their thoughts, even when they are not grounded in factual reality. You might not know exactly what the proposed policies of a politician you don’t like are, but you have a right to talk about them nonetheless. To deny this right because of some citizens’ incapacity to get properly informed might turn ugly pretty quickly.
Plus, not all fake news sharing is the same. There is a difference between those who produce fake news with the intent to create confusion and harm, and those who share it because they sincerely believe it. Furthermore, one does not need to believe in misinformation to share it: for instance, I could share a post from a misinformation website while criticizing it or while expressing how much I detest it.
Finally, the other side of the question: Would such a policy make the world a better place? I think that a very good analogy, here, is given by gentrification. When a neighborhood is gentrified, it means that it becomes a better place for people from other neighborhoods, and tourists in general, to visit: fancier shops and bistros are opened, colourful graffiti on previously gray buildings, and in general a downtrodden area becomes prettier. However, the people who lived there before will probably gain nothing from its gentrification: rent prices will skyrocket, and they will have to move their shops and houses somewhere else. Gentrification will not solve any of their problems.
Making the spread of online misinformation illegal would have a similar effect: it would affect only those who do not have the resources or the capacity to distinguish truthood and falsehood. It would increase the social divide between people with different degrees of online literacy instead of flattening their differences, producing more inequality and having serious repercussions for the democratic process. It would make Facebook nicer to visit, but it would probably end up silencing a great share of the population and not tackling the actual problem – the conditions that make people share misinformation. It would be like trying to remove the weeds in your garden by cutting the leaves instead of pulling their roots out – they are going to grow back, and your efforts will have been for nothing.
There is much more to be said with regards to your question; this answer, though trying to be as concise as possible, might have left something out. Let us know in the comments if you have any more questions on the topic 😀
What do you think? Should sharing fake news be made a criminal offence? Let us know in the comments!
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I did my BA in Rome, Università La Sapienza, where I graduated with a thesis about the contemporary debate on personal identity. I am now doing my Research Master’s in Philosophy of Mind at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. I am specifically researching how digital environments (and especially social networking sites) influence our understanding of the world and of others. I like Wittgenstein and theories of extended cognition, which argue that items external to the brain can constitute cognitive processes. I am fascinated by the idea of the cyborg and how the digital revolution is changing our understanding of the world.