Media Freedoms

The “lawful but awful” dilemma describes a longstanding tension between legality and morality in which systems, practices and speech may comply with legal standards but cause social harm. Platform companies struggle to apply fragmented, often U.S.-centric “marketplace of ideas” frameworks across diverse cultural and legal contexts. The challenge is not simply one of improving moderation tools or determining liability. It is about defining the desired end state of the information environment itself. Is the goal to reduce harm, preserve maximum speech, redistribute control over visibility, or make platform power more transparent and contestable? At times, these goals may conflict, and different governance approaches may implicitly prioritize one over the others.

Policy deliberation

Balancing free speech with mitigating systemic risk is a challenging task for policymakers. There is no standard or universal definition of “awful” or harmful speech, and there is little consensus on the specific points at which such harm necessitates action. A major legislative concern is the transatlantic divide between the U.S. Section 230 model, which protects platform editorial discretion, and the EU’s Digital Services Act, which mandates transparency and risk assessment. These debates involve competing concerns about free expression, user safety and well-being, and institutional power. Existing measures designed to address harmful content can shift significant authority either to private platforms or to governments, each carrying its own risks for public discourse. Debates also persist over whether platforms should be treated as neutral “common carriers” or as providers of protected editorial rights. These tradeoffs also highlight the practical reality that context-sensitive, large-scale moderation remains inherently difficult — if not impossible — to execute consistently.

Journalistic concerns

While journalists are not the only professionals — or even individuals — navigating these tensions, they operate under uneven legal protections across jurisdictions, which can both enable critical reporting and, at times, prevent harmful content from being held accountable. Some journalists’ workflows are shaped by the need to document human rights violations, which often requires sharing graphic or disturbing material. This creates a near paradox: platforms can serve as essential archives that preserve evidence and enable accountability, yet the same content can also cause harm to audiences. More profoundly, journalism itself faces significant challenges as the line between legacy journalists and content creators continues to blur, complicating who qualifies for legal protections. At the same time, journalistic business models and audience reach are increasingly affected by “visibility moderation,” in which platforms’ content moderation quietly limits how widely content is distributed. This can reduce the impact of important but sensitive reporting without a clear explanation or meaningful opportunity to challenge those decisions. Journalists must also navigate failures in algorithmic moderation that misinterpret political speech or protest slogans as violations, underscoring the need for more context-sensitive, human-led moderation to protect legitimate news coverage.

Technology governance

As technology firms do not operate in isolation from governments and institutions, developers are tasked with designing mechanisms that are transparent and democratic, while avoiding extreme openness that could be exploited by malicious actors. In addition, current algorithms have a limited ability to parse complex, context-dependent intent, such as satire. Multi-stakeholder alliances — made up of developers, civil society organizations and governments — must also grapple with the dual role of generative AI as both a detection tool and a source of harmful content. There are also issues around the lack of regional and linguistic expertise needed to prevent Euro-American cultural biases in global systems, as well as platforms’ economic incentives to amplify controversial content. Looking ahead, governance may shift toward user-controlled filtering rather than removal to make platform power more legible and contestable.