Marginalia /18 November 2025 EN
An Artefact of the Mass Media Age
The BBC was punished because the BBC could be punished. Our free-speech doctrine was calibrated for an architecture of scarcity that has gone.
In November the BBC was found to have edited a speech by Donald Trump in a way that changed its meaning. The consequences were substantial and swift: resignations, an apology, the threat of litigation, weeks of coverage in which the corporation was asked to account for itself. The same month, synthetic videos of Chuck Schumer circulated widely — fabricated speech, no author, no masthead, no address to which a complaint might be sent. Almost nobody asked anyone to account for anything.
It is tempting to read this as hypocrisy, and it is more interesting than that. We did not punish the BBC because it was the more dangerous of the two. We punished the BBC because it was the only one of the two that could be punished.
Our free-speech doctrine assumes a particular architecture. Milton assumed it, Mill assumed it, and the First Amendment was written under it: speech is costly to produce, speakers are locatable, and a falsehood can be answered by someone standing in the same arena. The remedy for bad speech is more speech, which presupposes that the correction can catch up with the claim, and that there is somebody there to receive it.
The mass media age made these assumptions look like descriptions of the world. A newspaper had a masthead, an editor with a name, an address for service, and exposure to libel. A correction was slower than the error and it did arrive, and it attached itself to the thing it corrected. None of this was designed as an epistemic safeguard. It was the incidental furniture of an industrial process, and it did the work of one regardless.
Synthetic media has none of that furniture. It carries no editor, incurs no liability, offers no surface against which a correction might be pressed. So we go on applying legal and reputational pressure to the institutions that can absorb it, while the infrastructure built for propagation without correction assembles itself, untouched, alongside them.
This is not a gap in the framework. It is the framework showing us what it was built to see.
Which leaves the doctrine in an awkward position: recognisably an artefact of the conditions that produced it, in the way that the correspondence theory of truth turns out to be an artefact of print and post. Free speech was not wrong. It was calibrated. And the calibration assumed a scarcity that has now gone, so that the classical remedy — more speech — has become indistinguishable from the mechanism of the disease.
I am wary of where this argument runs if it is left alone, because the obvious next move is to reach for the censor, and I have no interest in making that case. What I want is more modest and, I think, prior to it. Before we can work out what the doctrine now needs, we have to be honest about what it was resting on. It was resting on the presses.
Concepts
ConceptsLanguage produced without a composing subject.
The failure of the shared procedures by which a society settles what is true.
The five centuries of print-shaped knowledge now closing behind us. Sauerberg's and Pettitt's term, not mine.