In the post-truth era, lies aren’t just told. They’re monetized, incentivized, and amplified by complex networks that thrive on outrage and confusion.

Political misinformation today is not merely a moral or journalistic problem; it’s a structural failure involving regulatory loopholes, market misalignments, and digital systems that reward falsehood over fact.

Traditional fact-checking, whether by newsrooms, NGOs, or crowdsourced initiatives, is often noble, but ultimately reactive and insufficient. In an information ecosystem where disinformation is profitable and truth is costly, we must rethink our approach. If we want to defend democratic discourse, we need legal guardrails and economic disincentives for the industrial production of manipulated realities.

Regulation by infrastructure through truth standards

Most democracies treat disinformation as a freedom-of-speech issue, afraid that regulating political lies risks sliding into censorship. But this binary is outdated. Speech regulation already exists in defamation law, advertising standards, and securities fraud. We don’t let companies sell fake medicine or forge financial statements, why should politicians and influencers get a pass when they spread politically toxic falsehoods?

We need targeted regulation, not broad censorship. This might include:

Mandating real-time disclosures on the provenance of political ads (who paid, what data was used to target, and what claims are made).

Defining and criminalizing “deliberate disinformation campaigns” during elections, modelled on existing anti-fraud laws.

Requiring transparency reports from platforms about the reach and amplification of flagged falsehoods, especially during critical events like referenda or national elections.

Such policies wouldn’t criminalize opinion or satire but would target coordinated, malicious, and materially false information with legal clarity.

Economic Incentives: Making Truth Competitive Again

Disinformation spreads because it pays. Sensational, divisive, or conspiratorial content often yields higher engagement, which translates into ad revenue. Meanwhile, fact-checkers labour for free, usually after the damage is done.

To change this, we must shift economic incentives:

Tax disinformation: Introduce a “misinformation levy” on platforms that fail to remove or reduce the reach of demonstrably false content. Proceeds could fund independent fact-checking consortia.

Subsidize accuracy: Offer tax breaks or funding incentives for platforms and newsrooms that implement verified, open-source fact-checking systems and elevate credible journalism.

Demonetize lies: Require payment processors and ad networks to cut off funding to repeat disinformation actors, much like what is already done with extremist groups or piracy websites.

Markets can be shaped by regulation. The goal is to make misinformation not just morally wrong but economically irrational.

Digital Services Act, a good start.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) is a landmark EU regulation aimed at creating a safer and more accountable online environment. It updates the rules for digital platforms, especially large online intermediaries like social media networks, marketplaces, and search engines.

Key points on falsehood and disinformation:

Stronger Transparency: Platforms must provide clear information on how content is moderated, including policies on misinformation. They must also disclose how their algorithms rank and recommend content, helping users understand why they see what they see.

Risk Assessment and Mitigation: Very large online platforms (VLOPs), with more than 45 million users in the EU, are required to regularly assess and mitigate systemic risks, including the spread of harmful disinformation that can impact public health, elections, or security.

Notice-and-Action Mechanism: Platforms have to implement swift and effective procedures to remove illegal content once notified, including false information that violates laws such as incitement to violence or hate speech.

Independent Audits and Oversight: The DSA mandates independent audits of platforms’ content moderation systems and risk mitigation measures, ensuring compliance and exposing potential gaps in fighting disinformation.

Empowering Users: Users gain enhanced tools to report problematic content and appeal content removal decisions, strengthening user rights and participation in the moderation process.

Cooperation with Authorities: Platforms must cooperate with national authorities and regulators to tackle disinformation campaigns, particularly around elections or public health crises.

Information as a Public Good

The ultimate failure of the current information economy is that it treats truth as a commodity, not a public good. But if facts are the infrastructure of democracy, they must be protected, funded, and distributed like public health or clean water in order to create a civic infrastructure that ensures people have access to verified, contextualized, and diverse sources of information.

This means public investment in:

Independent, multilingual public media outlets, with a clear mandate for accessible fact checking and counter-disinformation.

Media literacy education, not just in schools but via public campaigns, civic institutions, and libraries.

Global fact-checking alliances, supported by governments and civil society, to coordinate responses to transnational disinformation threats.

Reconstructing Trust

Ultimately, this is about more than regulation or revenue, it’s about rebuilding trust in shared reality. The legal and economic reforms above will only succeed if accompanied by cultural shifts: greater transparency in institutions, renewed investment in journalism, and an honest reckoning with the role of power in shaping narratives.

But inaction is not neutrality. In the face of weaponized lies and mystified realities, failing to act is itself a political decision one that favours chaos over cohesion, manipulation over deliberation.

If democracy is to survive the post-truth age, it must be willing to defend truth not just with facts, but with forceful policy and meaningful accountability. Only then can the truth compete on equal terms with the systems designed to bury it. We should begin our de-bunking here, with dialogue and open mindedness, through relevant media platforms around the European Union, in our beloved Europe. Let’s start a column entirely dedicated to it, here and now: we can lead by example and commence to shape our time and our society, together!

This opinion piece has been selected as part of To Vima International Edition’s NextGen Corner, an opinion platform spotlighting original voices on the issues shaping our time

Gabriele Salvatore is an Italian lawyer and member of the legal service of the European Commission. The analysis and conclusions presented are personal and are the sole responsibility of the author. They do not reflect the views – nor do they bind – any institution with which the author is affiliated.