Özet:

This article aims to identify the greater threat to liberal democracies: “fake news” or domestic regulations intended to combat “fake news”. First, it assesses the impact of fake news on elections by analysing the 2016 US Presidential election in which the world faced the modern version of fake news for the first time and the 2019 EU Parliament election in which a non-regulatory initiative was launched to challenge fake news. Then, it evaluates the impact of regulations on free speech by reviewing liberal democracies’ pioneering regulatory frameworks intended to combat fake news: French Law no. 2018-1202, Germany’s Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, and UK’s Online Harms White Paper. It argues that, while damage to the functioning of democracy caused by fake news during election periods has not been as great as was feared, since fake news has several, highly politicised meanings, legal frameworks tend to over-regulate, which may violate the freedom of expression according to the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The article concludes that enhancing media literacy and non-regulatory efforts globally would contribute much more to prevent the impacts of fake news and to protect freedom of expression than legislative frameworks could, and that adopting regulatory frameworks to tackle the online dissemination of fake news should be reconsidered.

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