Regulating the Influencers
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This happened in 2025, but still I think it's worth discussing.
In late October 2025, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) rolled out a striking new regulation: influencers on major Chinese social-media platforms who wish to comment publicly on “serious” topics — such as finance, law, education or health/medicine — will now be required to hold relevant credentials (degrees, licences or certifications) and to submit those credentials for verification by the platform.
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According to regulators, the goal is to curb the spread of misinformation, amateur “expertise”, unverified claims, and to protect audiences that may be highly vulnerable to poor advice.I haven't think through how a version of this may be made to work in the USA's tradition with its Constitution's First Amendment, but on the whole I sympathize that popular non-experts spouting misleading "advice" on social media can be a public nuisance and may be seriously deleterious to public health and public trust.
Thoughts?
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It seems the "community notes" or other auto/up-vote summaries is the best way to keep free speech while letting the public correct misinformation. It's not perfect, but for example if you put out a lie on wikipedia, it usually is corrected, or if you add an incorrect fact to a reddit thread, it gets downvoted. So like, 90% of the time the truth bubbles to the top if there are enough people involved.
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