Censorship: To What Extent Can A Country Justify Media Regulation?

Image from European Parliament Conference which focused on the impact of social media and the 2014 European Elections. Photo by the European Parliament.

The democratization of the media has made it increasingly difficult to monitor content for misinformation. On May 1, 2015, former president of the United States, Barack Obama, discussed the importance of media on World Press Freedom Day. Echoing Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke’s theory of holding governments accountable, Obama impressed the importance of journalists maintaining democracy: “Journalists give all of us, as citizens, the chance to know the truth about our countries, ourselves, our governments. That makes us better. It makes us stronger. It gives voice to the voiceless, exposes injustice, and holds leaders like me accountable.” A reporter’s job of creating strength for the public and enforcing transparency between a government body and its people has ultimately been obscured by social media. In our contemporary society, where there is a surplus of information, the truth is ironically hard to come by. Fake news is a form of propaganda that creates an obscured narrative in order to appear like a news story. Manifesting itself in mainstream media, fake news can cause an array of issues from a misunderstanding within a small digital community to its implementation by non-state actors to desecrate democracy. 

Jarred Prier, in his article, “Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare,” discusses how propaganda is spread through an established network. Prier argues that previous and simpler versions of print propaganda were much less dangerous than their new digital form. Social media’s ability to spread propaganda under the assumption that there is an established and credible network of sources allows for the construction of a homophilic society in which individuals tend to be attracted to things or others who are similar to them. Social media exploits this phenomenon, creating echo chambers where radical ideas can appear as expert and trustworthy ones.

Given social media’s dangerous ability to promote and establish content with little truth, non-state actors have been able to capitalize on this and ultimately undermine democracy. In the 2016 election, Russia used misinformation to heighten racial tensions surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement as well as religious and gender-based divides. By influencing the election results, Russia was able to encourage radicalist thought as a non-state actor undermining a democratic nation. Russia’s Internet Research Agency is a group of Russian trolls designed to spread online propaganda in order to aid the country’s political and business interests. In 2015, Russian trolls manipulated the internet to portray President Obama as a weak leader in comparison to President Vladimir Putin. Other hijacked hashtags in the same year spread racist memes and hoaxes targeted towards African American individuals.

In the case of the 2016 election, Russian conservatism targeted left-wing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Russian operatives were able to build on existing narratives about the campaign, exploiting them to influence popular opinion. Hillary Clinton has been a target of conservative groups due to role as a First Lady, leading to a strong opposition against her during Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Russian trolls manipulated pre-existing divides to sway the election in the favor of a more conservative candidate, ultimately creating sensational, scandalous trending topics in the form of Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta’s leaked emails.

The European Union designed the Digital Services Act (DSA), effective as of 2024, to address social media's tumultuous record of creating societal and political unrest. The law is an ambitious attempt to regulate the e-Commerce Directive (2000), which was initially put into place to establish a legal infrastructure for online service providers, commercial communications, and electronic contracts. However, due to the immense change in the digital landscape and the introduction of social media, the EU plans to implement new legislation to further monitor online content and disinformation. The Digital Services Act will take effect right before the next presidential election in the United States. The law will place heavy content moderation expectations on prominent social media companies—the majority of which happen to be American-born firms—in order to limit the spread of propaganda and fake news. Failure to comply will result in a fine, which can be as high as 6% of a company’s annual revenue. 

Although the Digital Services Act might turn out to be a successful method of regulating social media content, a law of this nature could not be implemented in the United States due to the First Amendment. The First Amendment acts as the cornerstone of American values, protecting absolutist thought and guaranteeing the right to freely exercise all forms of free speech. Given social media’s major part in obscuring the American public’s perception of the 2016 election, it is difficult to imagine that the American government might not consider putting a law similar to the DSA into effect due to the infrastructural parameters created by the First Amendment. 

Unlike the United States, Germany, a democratic nation, embraces censorship in order to regulate fake news and hate speech. Under Article 5 of the German constitution, freedom of speech, expression, and opinion is established as an essential right to its citizens. Censorship began in Germany post World War II, when the publication of the German Grundgesetz (1949), or the basic federal law of the country, established two types of censored media.The first was offensive or indent media, which was restricted in its publishing and distribution to minors. The second criteria extends to anti-democratic content, which includes a ban on media relating to National Socialism. 

Nonetheless, NGOs like Human Rights Watch have argued that Germany’s newest legislation allowing them to monitor social media content, much like the Digital Services Act, gives dangerous amounts of power to nations. This ultimately begs the question: where do we stand on matters surrounding media censorship? Can censorship be justified in the pursuit of reducing hate speech and fake news, or is the United States’ First Amendment a better approach?

Lili Samii is a Staff Writer for CPR who plans to study a joint degree between Economics and Political Science.