@woozle @xgebi

Good question - this is exactly where the real disagreement sits.

Companies aren’t human beings and don’t possess human rights. Extending limited legal protections to corporations for functional reasons doesn’t turn regulation of corporate conduct into censorship of individuals. So ...

1. yes, I think policing that CAN be a legitimate state function. But the reason why matters.
Advertising is a transactional claim made for material gain: “buy this, it does X.” Untruthful advertising is closer to fraud law than to free expression. The state isn’t policing opinions, but enforcing honesty in commercial transactions. That’s regulation of actions, not beliefs.

The same logic applies to things like:

- financial disclosures
- product safety claims
- contractual representations

All of these involve asymmetric information plus coercive consequences.

1c. Where I disagree is extending that logic to “news” as a category of speech.

“News” is not a product with a verifiable performance spec. It’s a descriptive label, historically broad enough to include:

- incomplete reporting
- errors
- contested interpretations
- minority or unpopular claims
- early reporting that later turns out wrong

If the state becomes the arbiter of whether something qualifies as “truthful news”, it must:

- define truth in real time
- adjudicate contested facts
-decide when uncertainty becomes illegitimate
- and enforce compliance with penalties

At that point, we’re no longer preventing fraud - we’re governing epistemology.

2. we were discussing a hypothetical you introduced - namely, a state operating and moderating/censoring a social network intended for the general public. My remarks about how such moderation would constitute a human-rights violation are therefore hypothetical as well. To my knowledge, nothing quite like this has yet occurred, which is precisely why I can’t provide a concrete example. The argument is about principles and implications, not precedent.

That said, there are real-world analogies. In Germany during COVID, we saw formally independent but effectively quasi-state public broadcasters exercise significant agenda-setting power over public discourse - not primarily through explicit bans, but through selective amplification, omission, and the uncritical adoption of official government positions as authoritative. While not identical to direct censorship, this illustrates how state-adjacent media can exert coercive influence over the boundaries of acceptable speech. Manufacturing Consent is as analytically relevant today as when Chomsky wrote it in 1988.

3. You say this should be “strictly enumerated”, but that’s exactly the problem: there is no stable enumeration for truth in open-ended factual disputes. What looks like regulation today becomes precedent tomorrow.

On your point that “we have to solve this to survive the era”: I agree that the problem is real. Where we differ is the tool.

3b. I don’t think the choice is: state epistemic authority or doing nothing

There is a large middle ground:
transparency requirements (funding, ownership, conflicts), provenance and sourcing disclosure, counterspeech and correction mechanisms, media literacy and education, liability for knowing deception tied to concrete harm

All of those increase truth-resilience without granting the state power to decide which claims may exist.

So yes - the line between commercial claims and expressive claims isn’t always razor-sharp. But once we allow the state to regulate truth-content of non-transactional speech, we cross a threshold that is very hard to uncross.

My concern isn’t that the state would always abuse that power.
It’s that the power itself doesn’t scale safely with uncertainty, disagreement, and time.