The digitization of information has completely reconfigured the contemporary information ecosystem. If in the past information flows were vertical, hierarchical, and arbitrated by institutions acting as filters of legitimacy (such as traditional media or the educational system), today horizontal and highly unstructured logics prevail, as seen with phenomena like mass content creation by users on social networks or with generative AI (AI) that produces texts, images and videos indistinguishable from real ones. This apparent horizontality has given rise to a crucial paradox: the more information circulates, the more fragile our ability becomes to discern its quality, truthfulness, or relevance. In that space without common coordinates, disinformation thrives with unsettling effectiveness.
“The disinformation must be understood as a complex phenomenon, functionally structured to alter society’s understanding of reality”
Indeed, it is not simply about errors or isolated inaccurate data. Disinformation of our time must be understood as a complex phenomenon, functionally structured to alter society’s understanding of reality. Its effectiveness does not depend so much on explicit falsehood as on its capacity to erode the collective frameworks of interpretation. It does not aim to replace truth with a falsehood, but to dissolve the very possibility of reaching minimal consensuses about what is real. Operating through ambiguities, partial truths and contextual distortions, disinformation shifts trust toward narratives where emotion replaces evidence and skepticism replaces deliberation.
How Digital Platforms Amplify Misinformation
In this transformation of the public sphere, digital platforms have played a structural role. They are not mere channels, but algorithmic architectures that prioritize high-impact affective interactions, promoting the circulation of polarizing or sensationalist content. This attention economy, rooted in data extraction and the maximization of dwell time, overrides any evaluative criterion in favor of the commercial logic of digital capitalism. What generates intense reactions becomes visible; what requires nuance and evidence tends to disappear from the shared cognitive field.
The result is a hyper-visibility of the plausible, a kind of informational mirage where what seems true eclipses what is truly the case. In that continual flow of data, the appearance of truth substitutes verification, and the construction of public opinion becomes increasingly vulnerable to purposeful manipulation. The problem is not simply the existence of false content, but the practical impossibility of establishing shared frameworks from which to evaluate and compare divergent information.
Regulación democrática: límites legales contra la desinformación
From a legal and democratic perspective, this scenario poses a challenge of the first magnitude. Freedom of expression and the right to receive information are pillars of contemporary democratic systems. But like every fundamental right, they are not absolute. Since Enlightenment formulations it has been recognized that their exercise is bounded by the protection of other rights, principles, or collective goods. Article 4 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 expresses this clearly: “liberty consists in being able to do everything that does not harm others.” Applied to the informational sphere, this implies that the exercise of freedom of expression and the right to information can be limited when it comes into conflict with rights such as honor, non-discrimination, or the protection of public order.
“There has been extensive debate about whether one can speak of a ‘right to lie’ in political or journalistic discourse”
There has been extensive debate about whether one can speak of a “right to lie” in political or journalistic discourse. Most approaches agree that there is no such positive right: what exists is a right to emit information and opinions freely, which includes the possibility of error, but not the right to cause serious and deliberate harm through manifest falsehoods. In Spain, as constitutional scholars have noted, freedom of information is protected insofar as it concerns truthful facts under Article 20.1, letter d), of the 1978 Constitution. This requirement of veracity, although it does not impose absolute truth or irrefutable certainty, acts as a constitutional condition of the legitimacy of informational discourse.
Nor should one forget that veracity is, in the constitutional order, an institutional guarantee of political pluralism, understood as the citizenry’s objective right to receive diverse and well-founded information that allows them to form a free opinion. As such, it does not grant a direct subjective right to challenge false content, but it obliges public authorities to develop a system of plural, free and truthful media. In that logic, massive misinformation, especially when systemic, attacks that general interest and justifies measures to restrain or mitigate its effects.
It is worth underscoring that this framework does not seek to establish an “official truth” nor does it imply an authoritarian retreat on information freedoms. On the contrary, it aims to guarantee a public space structured around principles of transparency, verifiability, and pluralism. Public authorities should not act as custodians of truth, but as guarantors of the conditions that allow citizens to deliberate in freedom. This implies intervening in the architecture of digital environments so that public debate is not captured by logics of systemic disinformation.
“Public powers should not act as custodians of truth, but as guardians of the conditions that enable citizens to deliberate in freedom”
Comparative experiences offer valuable keys. Finland, for example, has deployed a comprehensive model of media literacy anchored in its educational system and coordinated institutional policies. This approach goes beyond teaching how to detect fake news; it promotes an epistemic competency that traverses all civic education. The critical understanding of media, the evaluation of public discourse, and the ability to cross-check sources are integrated as essential democratic skills.
Simultaneously, the work of independent verification networks, such as those integrated into the International Fact-Checking Network, shows that it is possible to develop autonomous and rigorous methods of information monitoring without infringing fundamental rights. These initiatives, when coordinated with democratic institutions, strengthen transparency and increase the resilience of societies against disinformation.
Nevertheless, these strategies will only succeed if they are embedded in a broader conception of the information ecosystem. Disinformation is not a problem that can be resolved exclusively from the perspective of point-by-point correction. It is necessary to intervene in its structural conditions of possibility: cognitive asymmetries, educational precarity, algorithmic opacity, the fragility of institutional ties, and the weakening of the social pact that sustained the public space.
This task demands political will, institutional commitment, and sustained social debate. It is essential that the regulation of disinformation be built from a guarantee-based perspective, balancing the protection of individual rights with the defense of the collective interest. The aim is not to censor, but to ensure that all voices can be expressed on equal terms and that public discourse is not hijacked by deliberate manipulation.
In this sense, the constitutional framework and the principles of European and international law provide sufficient instruments to guide this regulation. The goal is to build normative frameworks that promote high-quality information, stimulate pluralism, and sanction those practices that, deliberately, alter the public debate through systematic falsehoods.
“From Cicero to the interwar period, information was understood not only as a tool of communication, but as a weapon to define legitimacy”
The historical experience reminds us that disinformation is not a modern invention. Already in the Roman Republic, political actors used pamphlets, rumors, and theatrical representations to erode the image of their opponents and manipulate the people’s judgment. Cicero, in his speeches against Catiline, denounced the spread of hoaxes as a political strategy to destabilize the republic from within. The same happened, centuries later, during the Protestant Reformation, when anonymous prints served as weapons of religious and political propaganda. Or in the interwar period, when totalitarian regimes instrumentalized the means of communication to construct internal enemies and manipulate collective emotions. Those practices showed how information was understood not only as a tool of communication, but as a weapon to define legitimacy.
Today, as then, the struggle for information is a struggle for power. But the conditions have changed: the scale is global, the technology is instantaneous, and the consequences affect the cohesion of our democracies themselves. Therefore, it is not enough to merely adapt to the new environments: it is necessary to actively build fair public spaces, where truth does not force itself, but is not reduced to irrelevance either. It is about preserving the possibility of informed dissent, of reasoned pluralism, and of constructing a democratic coexistence based on shared language. That is the political and ethical task imposed by the digital era. And only thus can we critically dismantle the mirage that threatens to confuse noise with meaning, appearance with truth.
