Disinformation interferes with the right to vote. If beliefs are founded in false or inaccurate information, people are unable to make electoral choices that truly reflect their values. That is why combatting disinformation and lifting up reliable information is crucial to election protection. What are the systems that foster trustworthy and reliable information? Wikipedia is one of them -  calling itself the ground truth of the Internet, and its information serves as the basis for many useful services. Newspapers and journalists have historically been another. But burdensome regulation, waning margins, and political turmoil are creating barriers to freedom of the press and online dissent. 

We think of the First Amendment as a bulwark against government incursion into the freedom of speech. This has been so through each wave of technological innovation from the advent of radio and television to the dawn of the internet, and into the social media age. However, as more of our lives are accomplished online and with the advent of generative AI, government policy proposals increasingly place speech in their crosshairs, often with the best of intentions but also with the potential for collateral damage far beyond their intended scope.  This week the D.C. Circuit will hear oral arguments in the case related to the federal government’s ban of TikTok, a law passed, in part, in an attempt to suppress political content on that platform. The Supreme Court’s NetChoice decision was critical in clarifying the government cannot control online access to election-related and political speech by asserting that platforms’ speech moderation decisions in their newsfeeds are protected by the First Amendment. Even so, Congress continues to consider regulations of synthetic content with an eye toward protecting elections. Given the court’s decision in NetChoice, and continued attempts to regulate speech and generative AI platforms, what are the implications for First Amendment law? Is adaptation of doctrine necessary to address emerging issues? Or are the old precedents still applicable?

When all is done and dusted, we’ll need mechanisms to study the impact of new technologies.  One of the most important mechanisms we have for understanding and responding to the impacts of social media, generative AI, and other internet-enabled services have on free expression and elections is through independent research done on those platforms and services. Paradoxically, it’s getting harder and harder to study these platforms, whether because services are limiting researcher access, making it more expensive, or services are reducing their staff and initiatives related to research. Most concerningly, intimidation tactics have been used against researchers looking into efforts to destabilize democracy, which calls the question: how can we protect our elections if we cannot conduct independent research to understand the channels through which folks engage?