News organisations should be legally responsible for the accuracy of everything they publish online.

Today many people read the news on the internet, and sometimes this information is not true. Some people think that news companies should be punished by law if they publish something wrong. I agree with this idea in general, but I think it must have some limits.

On the one hand, false news can be very dangerous. During the pandemic, for example, wrong information about medicine made some people refuse treatment. Also, false stories about politicians can change the result of an election. On the internet a story travels to millions of people in a few hours, and even if the newspaper says sorry the next day, most readers never see the correction.

Furthermore, if there is no punishment, some websites publish shocking stories only to get more clicks and more advertising money. A law would force them to check the facts before publishing.

On the other hand, a very strict law can be dangerous too. Journalists sometimes write about corruption, and they cannot always prove everything immediately. If they are afraid of going to court, they will not write these important stories, and the government or rich businessmen can hide their crimes.

In conclusion, I believe news organisations should be responsible for what they publish, but the law should punish only serious and intentional lies, not every small mistake.

It is sometimes proposed that news organisations should face legal consequences for any inaccuracy they publish online. I agree that publishers must be accountable, but making them liable for everything would damage the reporting society most depends on.

The argument for stronger accountability is easy to accept. A false story now reaches an audience within hours, and the correction that follows reaches almost none of them, so the damage is effectively permanent while the remedy is symbolic. The commercial incentives make this worse: online publishing is paid by attention, and an alarming claim reliably outperforms an accurate one. Where inaccuracy is profitable and costless, expecting it to be self-correcting is unrealistic, and some external cost is clearly needed.

The difficulty is what a liability rule for all content would actually do. Investigative journalism is by nature uncertain — a reporter exposing corruption works from partial evidence and is frequently unable to prove every detail at the moment of publication. If any error carries legal risk, the rational response for an editor is not to be more careful but to avoid the story altogether, and the chilling effect falls precisely on reporting about people wealthy enough to sue. Small outlets would be silenced first, since a single case can end them regardless of whether they eventually win, while large organisations absorb the cost as a routine expense.

In conclusion, I support enforceable obligations to correct errors prominently, and legal consequences where a publisher acted recklessly or knowingly. Liability for every inaccuracy, however, would protect the powerful far more effectively than it would protect the public.

Nobody seriously argues that news organisations should be free to publish falsehoods. What the proposal actually asks is whether legal liability for every inaccuracy is the right instrument for enforcing that, and those are very different questions. My answer is that the goal is right, the instrument is wrong, and the reason is that a rule of this kind does not fall evenly on the people it is aimed at.

The case for acting is strong and worth stating properly. Online distribution has broken the mechanism that used to discipline publishers: a false claim now travels further in a day than a correction will in a year, so the reputational cost that once made accuracy commercially sensible has largely evaporated. Attention-based revenue then inverts the incentive outright, since an alarming claim outperforms a measured one and the alarm is monetised before anyone checks it. In that environment, appeals to professional standards are simply appeals to publishers to act against their own interests.

Strict liability nonetheless produces a perverse result, because its burden is asymmetric. Serious investigative reporting is inherently provisional — a journalist exposing fraud publishes from incomplete evidence, since complete evidence is exactly what the subject is concealing. Attach legal risk to every unproven detail and the rational editorial decision is not greater care but abandonment of the category, and the abandonment is selective: stories about people with the means to litigate disappear first. Meanwhile a national broadcaster treats claims as an operating cost, while a small outlet is destroyed by the legal fees of a case it eventually wins. A rule intended to restrain the powerful would be weaponised by them, and the attrition would fall on precisely the reporting that holds them to account.

What distinguishes a workable standard is that it targets conduct rather than outcome. Liability for publishing recklessly — without checking, or in disregard of contrary evidence — punishes the behaviour that produces disinformation while protecting the good-faith reporter who was wrong. Coupled with a genuinely enforced duty to correct with the same prominence as the original claim, this attacks the actual failure, which is not that errors occur but that they are profitable and never repaired.

I therefore disagree with the proposal as worded while agreeing entirely with what motivates it. Accountability is essential; making it unlimited would hand the wealthy a tool for silencing scrutiny, which is the opposite of what an accuracy law is for.