Stanczyk, LucasMacdonald, Matthew Somerled2026-10-1920262026-10-192026Macdonald, Matthew Somerled. 2026. A Distinctive Anti-Misinformation Right. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.32864922https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42760664Democracies worldwide face a problem. Mass communication is now dramatically faster, cheaper, more global, and more accessible than ever before. Yet the online speech environment provides exceptionally fertile ground for misinformation. And because misinformation can amplify so many other dangers - such as pandemics, climate crises, natural disasters, armed conflict, hate attacks, and election-interference - it can cause significant real-world harm. Many countries have responded by seeking to regulate online content. But those laws are controversial, for many of them seem to conflict with the basic right to free speech. The danger is most obvious in states that already have authoritarian leanings: there, anti-misinformation laws are frequently little more than a pretext for silencing legitimate dissent. Yet the worry extends even to liberal democracies such as Australia, Germany, and South Korea, all of which have grappled with the need to avoid chilling legitimate discussion while trying to prevent harm. The problem, therefore, lies in working out which misinformation (if any) can be restricted without unjustly threatening freedom of speech. To help solve this problem, I propose a distinctive new anti-misinformation right. This right targets some (but not all) forms of harmfully-misleading speech. In this dissertation I argue for the acceptability of an anti-misinformation right in general, and I offer what I think is a good candidate formulation of it. I argue that it would not be intolerably prone to political abuse, and that it would be compatible with the right to free speech. In the dissertation, I proceed as follows. I begin with what I think is a reasonable general account of rights within political morality. On this view, rights are morally-authoritative entitlements held by individuals. Their enforcement is the duty of the state. They aim to protect each person’s ‘basic interests’: clear universal needs, like physical safety, whose importance would be affirmed by any defensible moral view. What they protect against are ‘systematic threats’. These are significant dangers that predictably continue to arise in human societies, such that it is worth addressing them via morally-authoritative entitlements, held by each person, to particular sorts of protection. Rights are those entitlements. On this picture, rights can evolve (and new ones can emerge) over time. They do so in response to long-term changes in the available protections and the relevant systematic threats. Misinformation, I argue, is now one of those threats. That is not to say it is new, of course. Rather, it is significantly amplified by a combination of technological, economic, political, and psychological factors. Those factors are stable in the long term, and unlikely to reverse by themselves. Indeed, the ongoing rise of generative AI continues to hasten their basic trajectory. This alone does not justify a distinctive anti-misinformation right. For that, it must be shown that it’s possible to formulate protective entitlements that would help manage the threat without causing greater long-term harm overall. On my proposed formulation, the state has a duty to protect hearers from: (i) mass communication that (ii) seriously harms basic interests (iii) in virtue of misleading hearers (iv) about relevant ‘credibly-settled facts.’ Credibly-settled facts are those settled conclusively by overwhelming good evidence, as reflected in the collective verdicts of credible independent epistemic authorities. These features, I argue, help to explain why speech-restriction on the basis of the anti-misinformation right would be permissible. That is because they explain why many existing laws against harmfully-misleading advertising and product labelling are permissible already. The laws that prohibit sellers of bleach from putting ‘Safe to drink!’ on the bottle are widespread, quite uncontroversial, and rarely thought to endanger free speech or democratic legitimacy. I also examine justifications of the free speech right directly. The strongest justifications, I argue, are those that proceed from the value of hearers’ epistemic autonomy: that is, one’s capacity to think for oneself. The idea that one who is decieved by misinformation is thereby manipulated (and thus, that her autonomy is undermined) is plausible, and widely-argued already. But I think misinformation actually harms epistemic autonomy in a deeper way. Thinking for oneself requires various resources: e.g. time, effort, evidence, skill. A speech environment in which misinformation is rampant depletes some of those resources, because avoiding misinformation takes work. I argue that the depletion is unjust, in the relevant cases. Thus, one’s epistemic autonomy can be objectionably undermined even when one is not actually misled. Defenders of the autonomy justification for free speech also sometimes assert that protecting a maximally-open speech environment is the only way to respect one’s capacity to think for oneself. But respecting someone’s capacity does not involve ignoring the cost, to her, of exercising it, or expecting her always to pay that cost. So there is an additional reason why an anti-misinformation right is needed. Public authorities would be exploiting hearers’ capacities, not respecting them, if they allowed the public speech environment to fill up with dangerous nonsense and then expected hearers to do all of the epistemic work themselves.application/pdfenAutonomyCensorshipFree SpeechMisinformationPropagandaPhilosophyThesis or Dissertation2026-10-190009-0001-1182-4326