Preface

Disinformation, with the help of social media and the covid-pandemic have eroded trust in truth, science, press and other societal institutions and is pushing our democracies into dangerous post-factual pre-fascist state. We all suffer lies, hatred, hate speech and massive organized propaganda and it is clear, that all previous attempts at regulating social media have completely failed.

For disinfo experts it is clear, that we need a completely different approach to reducing disinformation, and also normal citizens ask themselves: how can all this hostile disinformation and even foreign influence propaganda go unpunished? On a meeting of disinfo experts and engaged citizens the #MakeLiarsPay project was born: let’s convince the legislators to penalize lies, hatred and hate speech on social networks and other communication channels.

However, when we returned from the project development workshop and talked to friends and lawyers about this, spontaneous reactions were very pessimistic. The concerns clustered around three topics against any regulation of communications:

• Ethics: Penalizing lies would limiting free speech would imply censorship
• Rules: It would be impossible to draw a line between truth and lies, to specify applicable rules
• Costs: Processing rule violations would overwhelm social network clearing departments and courts

We have realized that the idea of #MakeLiarsPay is too innovative not to be met with resistance. Put positively, the above concerns are based on false assumptions, and more fundamental work is needed to overcome these assumptions and begin to think beyond them. So we set out to prove that ethics, rules and costs are feasible, indeed have already been done: namwly when it comes to punishing dangerous, aggressive, anti-social behavior on the road. In other words, we have examined the most important sets of rules and institutions that regulate car traffic and transferred the findings to the punishment of lies, hate and hate speech in communication traffic. This has a double benefit:

• it disproves the above concerns
• in Germany, a car crazy country, there is nothing better than car analogies to convince and engage people

This 60-page non-paper Make Liars Pay has three parts:

• Background: this part explains the legal continuum from private free speech to public speech to freedom of press: spoiler: publishing with a wide reach to a large audience comes not only with rights but also with obligations. That is the ethical framework for limitations on “free” as in “careless and reckless”.
• Road traffic: this part analyzes an impressive list of institutions that participate in traffic regulation and actually enable freedom of driving exceptionally fast in Germany. The paper envisions similar functions in social communications
• Communication traffic: this part drafts a coherent system of rules and functions for communication, particularly
  • Rules: from car drives we do not expect optimal behavior (there is no need to define a precise truth), Instead, we expect some basic knowledge and mastery of the rules and some unacceptable behavior is codified and discouraged by penalties, the same is possible in communications.
  • Costs: In road traffic, we have established a graduated system of rule violations (administrative offenses, criminal offenses), which for the most part works efficiently, automatically without the involvement of the courts, and punishes millions of rule violations, thus preventing billions of rule violations and chaos on the roads. This works even better in communications traffic.