American Star Chamber: Online Misinformation, Government Intervention, and the Intellectual Matrix of the First Amendment

Authors

Emily E. Burton, Catholic University of America, Columbus School of LawFollow

Abstract

Just as monarchs and clerical authorities struggled to respond to seditious and heretical writings enabled by the invention of the printing press, twenty-first century governments are experiencing a similar information revolution as a result of the digital age and a rising tide of what the United States has labeled online misinformation. Like the printing press, the Internet has enabled the spread of information at an exponentially lower cost and an exponentially higher speed as it extends the ability to publish thoughts and opinions to an increasingly diverse array of individuals. Although this was largely celebrated during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the 2020s have been defined by growing concern about the quality of information that is spreading on the Internet, and the potential political, social, and health ramifications of a decentralized, unvetted wildfire of divergent ideas. Concerns about online misinformation have been growing since the late 2010s, but these concerns were thrust into the spotlight of United States policy by the sudden onset of the novel COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. This paper explores the question of whether the American notion of free speech can survive the digital age, and an even greater question—whether it should.

Recommended Citation

Emily E. Burton, American Star Chamber: Online Misinformation, Government Intervention, and the Intellectual Matrix of the First Amendment, 32 Cath. U. J. L. & Tech 79 (2024).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.edu/jlt/vol32/iss2/6