Beyond Falsehoods 2026

Global Trends in the Regulation of Misinformation and Disinformation

By Fakhar Abbas, Simon Chesterman, Eka Nugraha Putra

This report examines how governments around the world have responded to misinformation, disinformation and mal-information through legislation, regulatory measures and policy frameworks between 1995 and 2025.

Based on 409 coded regulatory and policy entries, the report explores the growth of regulation, changing regulatory approaches, and how laws operate in practice.

Executive Summary

This report examines global legislative and regulatory responses to misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information (MDM) between 1995 and 2025. Drawing on an expanded and updated dataset of 409 coded regulatory and policy entries, including hard and soft law, policy measures, and proposed or draft instruments, it analyses their growth, geographic distribution, substantive focuses, and regulatory designs, which represent the various approaches taken against MDM, as well as early evidence of their implementation.

The central finding is sustained and accelerating regulatory growth. Annual activity increased from 11 instruments in 2016 to 46 in 2023, 67 in 2024, and 71 in 2025. The number of instruments currently in force has reached 282, despite 34 measures having been repealed, withdrawn, or judicially invalidated. This growth has also been accompanied by a shift in regulatory focus. Earlier measures relied heavily on broad prohibitions of “false information,” whereas more recent measures increasingly target specific harms, including deepfakes, election interference, non-consensual intimate imagery, and child safety. Regulatory responsibility is also increasingly being placed on platforms rather than solely on individual creators and users.

The report classifies these responses into six regulatory models: truth-policing, criminal harm prevention, platform systems governance, victim-centred rights and remedies, provenance regulation, and resilience-based approaches. Criminal harm prevention and truth-policing remain among the most common. Since 2023, however, new regulatory activity has increasingly concentrated on platform systems governance, victim-centred remedies, and provenance regulation. This indicates a broader shift from assessing the truthfulness of individual claims towards regulating the systems, technologies, and actors through which information is created and distributed.

The report also moves beyond the formal content of legislation to examine how regulation operates in practice. Illustrative cases, such as Singapore’s POFMA, the European Union’s Digital Services Act, South Korea’s deepfake-crime amendments, and the judicial invalidation of truth-determination measures in India and Mongolia, show that enforcement outcomes, unintended consequences, and institutional capacity can differ substantially from what legislation provides on paper. The evidence suggests that regulatory effectiveness depends not only on the scope of formal legal powers, but also on the capacity of institutions to implement and enforce them consistently.

The report concludes by identifying priorities for the future. These include converting unstructured information on informational harms, safeguards and institutional arrangements into comparable variables; systematically recording implementation, enforcement, and judicial outcomes alongside formal legal powers; extending the analysis of factors associated with regulatory design and implementation; expanding the use of non-English-language sources; and maintaining the dataset through annual updates, with substantive updates planned for mid-2027 and mid-2028.

Download the Report and Dataset

Access the full publication and its accompanying research dataset:

Download full report (PDF): Beyond Falsehoods 2026 – Global Trends in the Regulation of Misinformation and Disinformation

Download landscape dataset (Excel): Beyond Falsehoods 2026 Dataset (data through 31 December 2025)

About the Research

This report is part of the Digital Information Resilience: Restoring Trust and Nudging Behaviours in Digitalization Programme at the National University of Singapore, known informally as Information Gyroscope (iGyro). The research is supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its MOE AcRF Tier 3 Grant (MOE-MOET32022-0001).