You Can't Legislate Trust
After sixteen years of drafting, redrafting and delay, Lebanon has a new Media Law. On 11 August, Parliament finally replaced a framework long overtaken by the way people actually consume information, and it deserves recognition for what it is: a genuine reform in a country that does not pass them easily. It brings digital media into a single legal framework for the first time, removes custodial sentences for most publishing offences, ends the pre-trial detention of journalists, and strengthens protection for sources. For anyone who has watched Lebanese journalists work under the threat of criminal prosecution, that is massive.
I welcome the law, but it’s worth being honest about what it can and can’t do, because the gap in between is where our work starts.
A media law acts principally on the supply of information. It governs outlets, journalists, platforms and publishers, and sets the rules for who can say what. This one reaches a little further than most, into media ownership and the transparency of financing, which touch the wider environment of trust. But the vulnerability that turns a rumour into unrest doesn't sit only with publishers. It sits with audiences, in how communities, especially those under strain receive, believe and repeat what reaches them. You can improve the conduct of every newsroom in the Lebanon and still leave people susceptible to manipulation, because the harder problem isn’t just what gets published, it's what audiences believe.
Nowhere is the limit of the legislative approach clearer than in the law's most contested feature. Amid the welcome decriminalisation, the law keeps criminal liability for publishing false news, a provision that drew objection even from within the government. You can understand the instinct; where fabricated content has had real and sometimes violent consequences, doing nothing feels irresponsible. But the provision carries two problems, the first is definitional: it treats false news as a single, prosecutable category, when what we are actually dealing with runs from honest error to careless misinformation to deliberate, coordinated disinformation, and each call for a different response. The second is that in a fragile, low-trust setting, policing falsehood can misfire. Standards are applied unevenly, and the voices most easily silenced or censored are not the well-resourced propagandists but the independent journalists and local figures who push back on false claims in the first place. Regulation has its place, and I am not arguing against it, but it doesn't fill the critical gap, which is to make people less susceptible to manipulation before it reaches them.
This is not an abstract concern. ARK has spent years measuring social tensions in Lebanon, community by community. From that vantage we see that disinformation is rarely the sole cause of instability, rather it tends to concentrate where tension is rising and trust in institutions is already thin. Watched over time, its role is clear, it works as an accelerant, taking a vulnerable community and pushing it towards action that a single manipulated claim would not have provoked on its own. That same experience shapes a view about what a response should look like. Effort has to be concentrated where the risk is genuinely high, rather than spread thinly across a general audience, and it should be judged by whether it actually reduces tension, not by how many people it reached. It has to be shaped locally too; credibility in Lebanon is a local currency, and a trusted voice in one community can be a stranger in the next. Reach is the easiest thing to deliver (and to measure) and among the least revealing. Tracking a fall in susceptibility is the much harder, but it’s what matters.
Measured against that standard, much of the current response in Lebanon, well-intentioned as it is, does not go far enough. The field is busy; there are media literacy campaigns and fact-checking networks, national initiatives and youth trainings, and I certainly wouldn't dismiss them. But much of the work is reactive: it helps people recognise or correct a falsehood after they have already met it, and it often measures itself by how far it travelled. What is largely absent is programming that’s preventive. There is promising evidence, from behavioural research and from work in other fragile settings, that resilience can and should be built before exposure, inoculating communities against the specific techniques used to manipulate them so that the false claim lands on prepared ground. I’m wary of overselling it, much of that evidence comes from controlled settings, and its durability and its transfer to real cohesion outcomes in a place like Lebanon are not reliably proven. But that's not a reason to wait, it's a reason to test it deliberately, and to measure honestly whether it works. There is also a responsibility that comes with this kind of work: deciding what counts as manipulation is not a neutral act, and resilience is something that must be built with communities rather than administered to them.
Our work in this space within the Palestinian camps in Lebanon reveals another gap that this law will not close. Legislation like this reaches the communities inside the national frame most fully. It reaches less well, or not at all, those at the margins: the displaced, people in border areas emptied and refilled by conflict, and others living beyond the reach of formal protection. These are often the communities where exposure to conflict-driven disinformation is highest and the safeguards thinnest. A law that improves conditions for mainstream outlets does comparatively little for them, and if resilience is to be built anywhere, it must be built there too, and deliberately, because it will not happen on its own.
None of this diminishes the achievement of the law. It just asks the question of what comes next. The real measure of this reform will not be the quality of its writing, or even in its direct implementation, it will be whether it is matched by investment in the resilience of the communities it is meant to protect. Trust can't be mandated into existence, it has to be built, in the places most at risk.