ABSTRACT
The legal exceptionalism of the internet has not helped journalism at all. For one thing, it has facilitated fake news, thereby encouraging attacks on the press, already weakened by its unsustainable claim of objective professionalism. The current situation reverses much of the legal limitation on press freedom but only for the net. Today, on the internet, primarily US-based online companies, obviously actually publishers, have successfully claimed to be common carriers (in American law), and the historic balancing of the human right of free expression against legal constraints has been largely abandoned. Internet giants assertively insist that they are, de facto, no more than postal workers distributing bags of unopened letters. And this despite them having in place censoring systems (but, driven by profit, deploying them only up to point). This absurdity, in the name of absolutist free speech, is powered by a naive technicism which insists that social media, because of their scope and prevalence, cannot be controlled – as if the same technological power that enables the web cannot be deployed to edit it. The 1995 American telecommunications law absolving internet giants from responsibility for content needs urgent attention. It is a real threat – and not just to the press.
