Introduction

With such provocative statements and his observation that “freedom of speech” can never translate into a right to “freedom of reach,” Comedian Sasha Baron Cohen's (2019) recent speech at the ADL's International Leadership Conference reignited the heated debate as to how to deal with fake news online: How much should be done? And leaving moral considerations aside, how much can actually be done?

Claims of fake news dominated major national elections on a global scale, notably the 2016 US Presidential Elections and the UK Vote to leave the European Union (“Brexit”) (Alcott and Gentzkow, 2017, p. 211; Rose, 2017, pp. 555– 56; Humprecht, 2019, p. 1973). Recent studies found that 47 percent of adults are getting their news from social media (Reuters Institute, 2020). These findings illustrate the worrying potential of fake news online. Fabricated information has always existed (Katsirea, 2018, p. 160); however, the concerning novelty is the tendency of such news to spread globally at an extraordinary pace (Alemanno, 2018, p. 1). Fake news spread “significantly faster, farther, deeper and more broadly through social networks than does true news” and it takes true stories about six times as long as false stories to reach people (Vosoughi et al., 2018).

Some, predominantly US, scholars, operating under the “marketplace of ideas” theory, have argued that instead of restricting speech the proper strategy would be more speech (Timmer, 2017, pp. 703– 4)— flooding people with actual news so that eventually, when presented with both, they are able to “sort out truth from falsehood” (Kerr, 2019, p. 494). Keeping in line with such metaphor we should however recognize that sometimes markets simply fail. Indeed, with research and reporting requirements and the need for editors and fact checkers, true news stories take longer and are much more expensive to create. In contrast, the “creative process” behind fake news takes only “one person with a little imagination and a working computer” to create content within minutes (Andorfer, 2018, p. 1423). Psychological factors such as our cognitive bias when processing information, our tendency to be more open to stories that are in line with our preconceived views or engage our emotions, and often our unwillingness or lack of time to extensively research both sides of a story further undermine this theory (McIntyre, 2018).