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Disinformation and the Defamation Renaissance: A Misleading Promise of “Truth”

Today, defamation litigation is experiencing a renaissance, with progressives and conservatives, public officials and celebrities, corporations and high school students all heading to the courthouse to use libel lawsuits as a social and political fix. Many of these suits reflect a powerful new rhetoricreframing the goal of defamation law as fighting disinformation. Appeals to the need to combat falsity in public discourse have fueled efforts to reverse the Supreme Court’s pressprotective constitutional limits on defamation law under the New York Times v. Sullivan framework. The antidisinformation frame could tip the scales and generate a majority on the Court to dismantle almost sixty years of constitutionalized defamation law. The new antidisinformation frame brings with it serious democratic costs without clear corresponding benefits. Defamation lawsuits cannot credibly stem the systemic tide of disinformation or predictably correct reputational harm, but they do threaten powerful chilling effects for the press, supersized by our current socio-historical context. Especially as claims of disinformation drift away from political speech to economic and social matters, this as a distinct justification increasingly evaporates. Lest progressives too quickly rejoice over the apparent success of their disinformation claims against rightwing media, antidisinformation defamation litigation presents an equal opportunity invitationand conservative cases are already on track. The new disinformation frame for defamation suits offers an illusory distraction and further politicizes defamation. Instead, the Article suggests a shift of focus to the audience in order to advance the anti-disinformation project while returning defamation law to its traditional concern with individual reputation.

 

Lili Levi *

* Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law.