Comparative Media Regulation in the United States and Europe

In current debates over the Internet’s impact on global democracy, the prospect of state regulation of social media has been proffered as a solution to problems like fake news, hate speech, conspiracy-mongering, and similar ills. For example, Mark Warner, a senator in the US Congress, has proposed a bill that would enhance privacy protections required of internet platforms, create rules for labeling bot accounts, and change the legal terms of the platforms’ legal relationship with their users. In Europe, regulation has already been enacted in the form of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and new laws like the Network Enforcement Law (NetzDG). This chapter will survey this rapidly developing field, putting current efforts of liberal democracies to regulate internet content in the broader perspective of legacy media regulation. As we will see, there are very different national approaches to this issue among contemporary liberal democracies, and in many respects the new internet regulations, actual and proposed, are extensions of existing practices.