A right to free speech should not trump our right to the truth. It is time our laws recognised that

We live in a sea of lies. A fifth of Americans believe Taylor Swift is a Pentagon asset who conspired to rig the 2024 election for Joe Biden; 15% believe their country is run by a Satan-worshipping paedophile ring. Here in the UK, nearly one in 10 think climate change is a deliberate hoax, and on average people overestimate the proportion of immigrants by a factor of three. Elon Musk’s X tells them murder rates are spiralling out of control (in fact they’ve been falling for decades), and that the country is on the brink of civil war, while millions across the globe genuinely believed that the Covid pandemic was a cover for Bill Gates to implant microchips.

When the most basic facts are so misunderstood, democracy struggles. Yet the constitutions and legal frameworks that govern our societies – the US Bill of Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, the statutes of British law – protect your right to say almost anything, while none guarantees a right to truth. None. This is the uncomfortable paradox at the heart of our democracies. They are steadily being undermined by a tide of lies, often pushed by billionaires and the cognitive warfare teams of Russia and China that are doing their best to sow chaos and confusion. But they lack the means to fight back.

The architecture of deception

According to a recent UN global survey, more than 85% of people are worried about the impact of online disinformation. The reason is not hard to locate: social media platforms – Google, YouTube, Meta, TikTok – now dominate our informational landscape. They were designed not to inform but to engage. And engagement, it turns out, is most efficiently generated by fear and anger. One study found that each additional negative word in a headline increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. The platforms could have been built differently. They weren’t.

Politics, already no great temple of candour, has suffered accordingly. The Washington Post catalogued more than 30,000 false or misleading claims from Donald Trump during his first presidency alone. Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon articulated his media strategy with characteristic bluntness: “flooding the zone with shit” – so polluting the informational space that people would distrust everything, and cease to distinguish facts from lies.

The result has been a steady erosion of the mechanisms that support truth. In Britain the ministerial code notionally requires ministers to resign if they knowingly mislead parliament. Over the last decade, it has become less strict in its interpretation. Blatant dishonesty, once career-ending, has begun to carry a curiously low political price.

The rules of parliament are also interesting in this respect. You can be held in contempt of parliament for “deliberately attempting to mislead the House or a committee”. Yet, bizarrely, you are more likely to be expelled from parliament for calling another MP a liar than for lying yourself.

The liberal blind spot

The orthodox liberal response to all of this is to advocate more speech, not less – to trust the marketplace of ideas to sort the true from the false. This was the argument of Milton in the 17th century, Madison in the 18th, Mill in the 19th. The west’s approach to speech assumes that free and fair competition in the marketplace of ideas will ensure that truth triumphs over lies. But we now know that this is wrong.

Something similar to Gresham’s Law, which says that bad money drives out the good, can be applied to information. The true does not automatically displace the false – it never did – but the internet has supercharged the mechanisms by which falsehood spreads and metastasises. The liberal tradition has become not a defence of freedom, but a shield for those who profit from deception.

Compounding this is an intellectual inheritance, from many currents in academia, in which an entirely valid suspicion of authoritative truth-claims curdled into a generalised scepticism about truth itself. Generations were taught in universities to doubt any claims to authoritative truth, and scepticism about truth became a mark of sophistication in many circles. This was liberating, in some respects. In others, it handed ammunition to every huckster and demagogue on the planet.

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the hero, Winston Smith, comments that the fundamental root of freedom, from which all else follows, is “the freedom to say that two plus two equals four”, not that two plus two equals five.  He understood well the difference between freedom of speech and the right to lie that always empowers dictators, autocrats and the enemies of freedom.

We already have some of this

The good news – and it is genuine – is that a right to truth already exists in pockets of our legal and institutional architecture. Finance law imposes harsh penalties for deception in company accounts and investor communications. Consumer law punishes false advertising. Courts exist explicitly to establish the best available truth from the best available evidence.

Courts use sophisticated forensic tools, such as DNA, to make better judgments. As Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls in the UK, put it 50 years ago: “The primary duty of the courts is to ascertain the truth by the best evidence available”. Witnesses are required to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. And sometimes the courts can rule on deliberate lying, as they did in the US when they imposed damages of nearly $800m on Fox News for having knowingly spread lies about the 2020 election.

Modern science tests ideas and mobilises critical peers to interrogate claims. The motto of the Royal Society – nullius in verba (take no one’s word for it) – encapsulates an institutional commitment to doubt that has served humanity well.

These institutions are not perfect, but they demonstrate that truth-seeking can be structurally embedded in society, and that there is nothing inevitable about the corrosion of reliable truths. The question is why we have not extended the principle.

What a right to truth would look like

A right to truth would essentially be a right not to be lied to. It would bring serious penalties to bear on powerful organisations that knowingly spread lies, whether they are businesses, government agencies or internet platforms.

It wouldn’t give governments the power to become arbiters of reality – a power that would, rightly, terrify anyone with a sense of history. Rather, it is a right not to be lied to that would be enforced by the courts, just as happens throughout finance and the economy.

In practice, this would mean extending consumer law principles. One area to start with is politics. In 2026 the Welsh Senedd introduced a new law making it illegal for politicians to lie in elections – a hugely important step towards less impunity in politics (and one that only one Sennedd member, Reform’s Laura Anne Jones, voted against). Another step would create independent electoral integrity commissions with genuine powers to act rapidly when misinformation or deepfakes circulate in the days before an election.

But the need for rights to truth goes far wider. It should mean heavier regulatory pressure on platforms, with fines that actually sting when these spread deliberate lies and misinformation. It should mean more support for institutions that do seriously uphold trust, including public service broadcasters. And it should mean education systems that treat media literacy as a core subject, not an afterthought. Finland and Denmark are leading the way by incorporating lessons on disinformation into curricula. In the UK, a recent survey found that only 2% of children have the skills to identify misinformation.

Ultimately, this argument rests on something deeper than law. Almost every right turns out to depend, either implicitly or explicitly, on a right to truth. A right to a fair trial is meaningless unless jurors receive accurate information. A right to healthcare is hollow if doctors cannot be trusted to tell you what they know. A right to vote is a charade in an environment where the powerful are free to lie without consequence.

Elon Musk and others fervently believe that freedom of speech is an absolute good, and that the right to lie should outweigh any right to truth. Their view is understandable, and has honourable roots. But it has become increasingly dangerous and ill suited to the times.

The stakes are now extraordinarily high. If we don’t update our laws and institutions, we should not be surprised if our societies become not just more confused but also more polarised, more distrustful and ever less able to cooperate effectively. That is exactly what some of our enemies want. We should be smart enough to act.

Geoff Mulgan is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London

Photograph by CBS Photo Archive