The call for tighter control over “misinformation” has become a reflex for politicians looking to exert influence over the chaotic landscape of social media. Following recent high-profile incidents and public disorder, there is a loud, growing demand for authorities to step in and sanitize the digital sphere. However, as Paul Ormerod points out, this initiative faces a philosophical and practical brick wall: who defines what is true, and more importantly, who gets the power to silence what they deem “false”? While reports like those from the Social Market Foundation reveal the volume of verifiable falsehoods circulating online—ranging from fabricated council policies to unfounded insults—the transition from identifying a lie to legislating against it is fraught with danger. The moment we empower a government or a third party to draw the line between a robust opinion and “misinformation,” we begin to erode the very democratic principles we aim to protect.
To understand the peril of policing speech, we need only look back at the 2016 Brexit referendum, which serves as a masterclass in how “facts” are weaponized by all sides. For many, the infamous Leave campaign bus, with its promise of redirecting £350 million to the NHS, remains the quintessential example of misinformation; the UK Statistics Authority itself rebuked the claim. Yet, it serves us well to remember that the Remain campaign was equally guilty of peddling catastrophic falsehoods under the banner of “Project Fear.” Their Treasury-backed forecasts promised an immediate recession and a surge in unemployment that simply never materialized. By the end of 2016, unemployment had actually dropped, not skyrocketed. If we had empowered a truth-arbiter to regulate that campaign, would they have silenced the Treasury or the bus, and what would that have meant for the integrity of our democratic choice?
The difficulty of separating “truth” from speculative opinion became even more complex during the Covid-19 pandemic. We were governed by epidemiological forecasts from institutions like Imperial College, which predicted half a million deaths if lockdowns weren’t immediately enacted. While these projections were grounded in mathematical models, they ignored the fundamental reality that human beings are not static actors. As history shows, human behavior shifts instinctively when people fear for their lives. Despite ignoring this essential trait of human nature, those dire predictions were treated as settled science rather than dynamic risks. When every forecast that doesn’t come to pass is labeled as disinformation, the public loses trust. We must acknowledge that what is sold as “fact” is often just an interpretation of data or a projection of a specific agenda.
History teaches us the terrifying conclusion of allowing institutions to act as the ultimate arbiters of truth. In the Soviet Union, the state-mandated narrative insisted that living standards were superior to the West—a “fact” maintained through strict censorship. It wasn’t until soldiers during the Second World War entered Eastern Europe and saw the reality with their own eyes that the lie crumbled. The regime’s reaction to this truth was not transparency, but the mass imprisonment of those who dared to share their observations. This isn’t intended to equate modern social media moderation with Stalinism, but it serves as a stark reminder: whenever we grant a central power the authority to determine what is “true,” the primary casualty is almost always inconvenient reality, and the final destination is the stifling of political dissent.
The temptation to regulate is, at its core, a reaction to things we find provocative, upsetting, or fundamentally wrong. We see a social media post that angers us, and we look for a “report” button or a legislative hammer to sweep it away. But the nuance of complex social issues cannot be captured in a binary of “true” and “false.” Misinformation is a nebulous, shapeshifting beast that evolves based on the biases of those observing it. By attempting to curate a “cleaner” internet, we are actually building a fragile system that is easily exploited by whoever holds the pen at the time. A society that survives on the suppression of ideas is not a society that is safe; it is a society that has lost the ability to challenge, debate, and verify information for itself.
Ultimately, instead of rushing to build an apparatus of censorship, we should place our faith in the resilience of democracy itself. Democracy is not designed to be comfortable or free of friction; it is designed to be a marketplace of ideas where the best arguments survive the test of time, not the ones enforced by the state. We should focus on media literacy, institutional transparency, and the encouragement of dissent rather than the creation of thought police. While it is undoubtedly easier to call for a crackdown, the more difficult path—trusting the public to judge information for themselves—is the only way to ensure that we do not lose our capacity for independent thought in the pursuit of a sanitized digital world.