Global Legislation on Misinformation, Disinformation and 'Fake News'

Research Team: Simon Chesterman*

*Special thanks to Jiang Yu Hang, Shireen Lee, Elizabeth Ong, Amelie Roediger, Clarie Sng, and Sripratak Thanakorn for invaluable research assistance.
Thanks also to Eka Nugraha Putra, Araz Taeihagh, and Audrey Yue for comments. Data visualizations by Kai Xin Soh.

Try out our interactive map above! You can press the 'play/pause' button and click on the timeline to explore how the number of legislations changes over time.

Mapping out the global landscape of legislative movements on 'fake news' and misinformation, we show how laws enacted to tackle misinformation, disinformation, and 'mal-information' around the world have evolved over the past two decades from 1995 to 2023.

In particular, laws tended to be introduced first in countries that were less free (in terms of civil liberties), such as African and Asian countries. More recently, Asian states are responsible for a significant increase in laws and have tended to grant greater powers to governments. Despite early reservations, the growth in such laws is now steepest in Western states, such as the United States, Canada, and the European Union.

The above bivariate choropleth map shows the distribution of laws on misinformation and political freedom around the world, as of 2023, whereby dark purple areas represent countries with relatively higher political freedom and high number of misinformation laws, dark blue areas represent countries with relatively higher political freedom and moderate number of misinformation laws, light blue areas represent countries with relatively lower political freedom and fewer misinformation laws, and pink areas represent countries with relatively lower political freedom and moderate number of laws. Grey areas represent regions/countries where no data is available.