ABSTRACT
New technologies allow users to communicate ideas to a broad audience easily and quickly, affecting the way ideas are interpreted and their credibility. Each and every social network user can simply click ‘share’ or ‘retweet’ and automatically republish an existing post and expose a new message to a wide audience. Thus, a message or a post can travel around the world and be viewed by millions of users within mere seconds. Sharing information and ideas is an inherent part of every interaction and relationship on social media. The dissemination of ideas can raise public awareness about important issues and bring about social, political and economic change.
Yet, digital sharing also provides vast opportunities to spread false rumors, defamation, and Fake News stories at the thoughtless click of a button. The spreading of falsehoods can severely harm the reputation of victims, erode democracy, and infringe on the public interest. Holding the original publisher accountable and collecting damages from him offers very limited redress since the harmful expression can continue to spread. How should the law respond to this phenomenon and who should be held accountable?
Drawing on multidisciplinary social science scholarship from network theory and cognitive psychology, this Article describes how falsehoods spread on social networks, the different motivations to disseminate them, the gravity of the harm they can inflict, and the likelihood of correcting false information once it has been distributed in this setting …
Lavi, Michal, Publish, Share, Re-Tweet, and Repeat (May 23, 2021). University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, volume 54, no 2, 2021.
First posted 2021-07-13 14:00:18
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