Journalism, Disinformation and the First Amendment in the Age of A.I.​

 

By Mike MacMillan

February 20, 2026

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There was a time when many people didn’t believe it was possible to speak directly to God. That’s what priests were for. Then, along came Martin Luther, and, suddenly, God was hearing all kinds of chatter. Everybody and one’s brother (and sister) were talking to God. 

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So with God then, so with the media now. 

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Once there was The New York Times; now there’s Tik Tok and X (née Twitter), Facebook and Bluesky. Instagram. Snapchat. Now those who once had little voice can make themselves heard. More than that, they can have a conversation with the ether, courtesy of AI-driven chatbots. 

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While few object to the principle of more speech – or even to chatbots per se –  there’s a sense that things have become too loud, too chaotic. There is a dark side. God had Lucifer; social media has InfoWars and its ilk. Chatbots and AI have their hallucinations. What to do?

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One answer has been suggested by Elon Musk, he of Tesla, SpaceX, and X. “You are the media now,” he has said. Based on the proliferation of cell phone videos, of first person news accounts posted on Substack or TikTok, he could be right. 

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But it’s just this babble of voices that has led to the flood of dis- and mis information, and to subsequent efforts to sequester free speech, sometimes by the platforms, sometimes by the government leaning on the platforms or legacy media, and sometimes by self-appointed citizen soldiers and interest groups, who see themselves as guardians of the “truth.” 

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How is all this impacting journalism, both as it is practiced and as it is taught? One major area of concern is self-censorship – the story not reported, the words not said. In a 2022 paper entitled Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States, Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and regular commenter on free speech issues, cited a “poll of 800 full-time undergraduate students (that) found that a majority ‘felt intimidated’ in sharing their views due to the expressed views of their professors and other teachers. As with the growing intolerance among professional journalists, this trend is evident among student journalists and editors,” he wrote (my emphasis. Note: Mr. Turley was UNC AFSA’s guest in 2025 at their Annual Meeting in Chapel Hill, NC.) 

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Another area of controversy is the more fundamental debate over whether or not there is content, or forms of speech, that should not be protected. This was a subject of discussion during UNC’s 2024 First Amendment Day as part of a panel called “Weaponizing First Amendment Rhetoric.” 

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Daniel Kreiss, Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Professor at UNC’s Hussman School, and a participant on that panel said that the “weaponization” referred to there was the use of the First Amendment by one side or the other “to make sure their content gets heard. On the right it’s been about (too much) censorship. On the left it’s been that governments need to do more to regulate platforms (too little censorship). (Both sides) want platforms to create certain social outcomes by limiting speech. 

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“Everyone has a right to make those arguments,” he adds, but “they don’t have a right to regulate (speech) in ways that violate the First Amendment.”

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Kreiss is clear that a distinction should be made between the policies of the social media platforms and government interference with those platforms. The latter is clearly covered by the First Amendment while the former is not, he says.

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But this is increasingly a distinction without a difference. No one is gathering around the agora anymore, but they do congregate on social media. Seventy-one percent of Gen Z and Millennials get their daily news from social media platforms, according to the American Press Institute, with Instagram and TikTok the two leading sources. Governments, including the current one, and activists increasingly make it clear when they disapprove of how events and policies are reported and how they appear on social media. By leaning on the platform they hope to affect the nature of the content on that platform. 

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Outside the U.S., this has resulted in legislation like Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the stated purpose of which is to make online space “safer” by prohibiting “hate speech” and other forms of content deemed dishonest or misleading. Here, the pressure is on the platforms to regulate the conversation. Without the benefit of a First Amendment the ability of users to challenge these restrictions is limited.

 

“Presumptively Harmful”

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Whether it’s ChatGPT, TikTok, or AI, the national conversation continues to move away from legacy media and towards outlets with fewer checks and balances, posing new challenges to professional journalists and to free speech protections as they have historically been understood. For the moment, the platform issue has receded in the public mind, replaced by concerns over AI, better deep fakes, and, especially, chatbots. Would a chatbot reporting on the news constitute protected speech? It seems unlikely but it may only be a matter of time before someone makes that argument.

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Turley has written that, “Free speech is now treated as presumptively harmful absent governmental and corporate regulation. The harm is often ill-defined and applied inconsistently. The premise remains that unregulated free speech can threaten the democracy as a whole or it can threaten individual students who feel unsafe due to the expression of opposing views.” 

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Countering mis- and disinformation is no doubt difficult, and citizen journalists and chatbot-driven conversations only add to the complexity. For now, the view among at least some U.S.-based  free speech advocates is that way forward is “the more speech the better,” as Walter Hussman, president and CEO of WEHCO Media, has said. 

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Kreiss says, “I don’t think any one of the social media platforms is the ‘public square.’  I think we have many, many public squares. I think we benefit from a robust, capitalist public square with many different public forums that have many different rules that govern them. This is in essence what we’ve had throughout U.S. history.

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“We have a public square but we also have all sorts of privately maintained newspapers, cable channels. Every one of those publications is free to set its own rules. We benefit from that pluralism where many different actors are setting many different rules and engaging in many different kinds of speech.” 

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 All this presumes the existence of the First Amendment. “The First Amendment is eternal,” says Matt Winkler, editor-in-chief emeritus of Bloomberg LP and co-founder of Bloomberg News. “The issue that prompts the discussion is that where there were once independent media forcefully defending the First Amendment those media have diminished. In their place are corporations that own traditional media and their interests are not aligned necessarily with the First Amendment. Their interests are keeping the shareholders happy.”

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This creates potential vulnerabilities for free speech advocates. “Journalism is trying to grapple with the problem of rampant falsity and disinformation,” says Professor William Marshall, who teaches First Amendment and Media Law at UNC. “The question is whether or not some kind of regulatory authority can come in and fix that or whether the fix is worse than the problem itself.”

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“The era that we’re in is the clash of information versus misinformation or disinformation,” says Winkler. “That just doesn’t go away. On the one hand, we can know things faster. On the other hand we are misinformed to a great extent, or not informed, through the same freedom of access. I would invoke Adam Smith. To him what we now call capitalism is that there is a great deal of competition. And if there is competition you don’t have a handful of entities that were controlling the market for goods and services or for information.”

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This goes to a point made emphatically by Turley: the open exchange of ideas – even bad ones – is antiseptic. “Free speech does not cure stupidity, it merely exposes it,” he has written.

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But whether or not free speech can survive in the age of AI remains to be seen. The cost of AI model development suggests a winner-take-all outcome, in which a handful of well capitalized companies come to dominate, potentially shrinking the marketplace for ideas. While AI does often provide links back to real journalism (the underlying sources) there’s no guarantee that users will avail themselves of this and look through to the sites. Further, AI itself can introduce its own bias into the process in both content and source selection.

 

We’re not all journalists yet

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The flip side, of course, is that we become a nation of citizen journalists, as Musk has suggested.  Both Kreiss and Winkler take exception with this idea. There is, they believe, still a vital role to be played by trained reporters and by journalism schools like Hussman in educating the next generation of scribes.

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“To me, there are a few things that define journalism,” says Kreiss. “The first is having a commitment to the public. Journalism has a commitment to the truth, in the sense of how do you discern it? You have to act in good faith. You might have an opinion but it has to be tested against the evidence.”

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Adds Winkler, “There’s a set of skills and knowledge that makes us journalists. He (Musk) and everyone can say whatever they want. That’s not journalism. That will never be journalism.”

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But the challenge to traditional reporting is morphing quickly. At the same time, citizen journalists seem to want to have it both ways: wrapping themselves in the First Amendment when convenient, but ignoring the concomitant journalistic obligation to report fairly and accurately. So called hate speech and other forms of aggressive advocacy open the door to further censorship.

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In spite of all this, Winkler, Bloomberg’s editor emeritus remains an optimist. “Back in 1710 Jonathan Swift wrote that ‘falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it.’  Three hundred and fifteen years later, we’re still in a perilous period, unfortunately,” he says. But, he adds, “we still have reason to prevail.”

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More is better has been the position of free speech advocates for as long as these debates have raged. It is an imperfect solution for an imperfect world, but for all its flaws it remains the one indispensable idea at the heart of our republic.

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