Legal Safeguards of Truth

Theoretical Bases, Constitutional Limits, and Regulatory Instruments of Countering “Fake News”

This project seeks to analyze and assess the constitutional and practical possibilities and limits of legal instruments countering the spreading of “fake news,” especially in the digital realm. In the past decade, the phenomenon of “fake news”— severely exacerbated by the digital media revolution—has raised persistent and heightened concerns throughout liberal democracies. Indeed, what we take to be factually the case as well as sufficiently shared epistemic standards are the foundation upon which any human—and thus also political—decision-making builds. However, since the beginning of modern constitutionalism, policing “the truth” as such through state power has been considered a problematic undertaking, often conceived as opening up a slippery slope towards autocracy. Given this tension between the need for sound epistemic bases of collective and individual decision-making, on the one hand, and liberal-democratic commitments, on the other, my research aims to analyze and clarify the constitutional grounds for, limits to, and red lines of safeguarding “the truth” and/or sound epistemic norms through legal means. On this basis, it will seek to suggest new regulatory instruments that might counter the harms of digital misinformation without violating dearly held constitutional commitments.