"Infodemic". Regulating initiatives to restrict disinformation about the pandemic and its implications to freedom of speech.

The corpora of this collection show the different regulatory, co regulatory and self-regulatory initiatives to impose restrictions on disinformation about the pandemic as well as the criticism they have received particularly regarding the negative impacts on the freedom of speech. The time period is from the March 2020 to July 2021. Τhe outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 was followed by a concurring «infodemic». The dissemination of inaccurate and misleading information for the pandemic could cause confusion, spread fear to the general public and make more difficult the implementation of health protection measures. Thus, its restriction was attempted. States adopted emergency legislative measures to battle health disinformation. At the same time, international human rights’ organisations pointed out that these attempts could be used as an excuse and result to hamper the work of journalists and media actors and restrict public’ right to receive information. In addition, social media were considered super spreads of misinformation about the pandemic. Platform intermediaries as Facebook adopted special policies and new technical tools to filter harmful third parties’ content. States issued regulatory and co regulatory initiatives to impose to platforms to police their content more effectively. During the consultation and impact assessment procedures for these regulatory initiatives it was pointed out that imposing restrictions to internet speech can result to negative implications for freedom of speech