ABSTRACT

If 20th century broadcasting indicates democratic societies’ high level of tolerance for state interference in media content, 21st century digital media platforms display the reverse. Like radio or computing itself, the internet was also born of military technologies, but from the outset the state’s control of infrastructural development was separated from the protocols governing its uses. Society, bedazzled by digital utopianist rhetoric, accepted claims of its fundamental uncontrollability, and allowed those exploiting the technology to do so without the constraint that no damage be caused – a crucial restriction that had always contained even press freedom. The net’s supposed virtuality allowed its communication empires to be effectively unaccountable, while political effects, even revolutions, were ascribed to the messages it carried. But hyperbolic assertions of the internet’s transformative impacts are not much supported by evidence. Rather, notions of influence have reflected a naive belief in the media’s ‘hypodermic’ effects, a concept long deemed inadequate. Despite claims of fundamental transformation, the legacy media have profitably persisted, and Governments are beginning to contemplate internet regulation. Though the internet has never been the heart of the fake news ‘problem’, its lack of regulation has certainly permitted fakery to make a home for itself online.