People make good decisions when they have good information. Requiring credentials to be posted for people discussing sensitive topics like medicine, law, education, and finance is a really interesting idea.
China has passed a new law that's being called the "Influencer Law." In short:
If you want to post on social media about certain sensitive topics, you have to have a relevant degree or credential in that area.
The designated sensitive topics are:
As you'd expect, there are people who are thrilled about this — and people who are deeply upset. Here's where I land on it.
I've always believed that people make good decisions when they have good information. The flip side is also true: when the information is wrong, the decisions are wrong, and in some fields, those wrong decisions can ruin lives.
In medicine, law, education, and finance, bad information doesn't just inconvenience you. It can:
So I understand the instinct to put some guardrails around who is allowed to speak authoritatively in these domains on a platform that reaches tens of millions of people.
In my own field, there have been studies examining the accuracy of medical content on social media, and — predictably — they find:
Some of those laypeople have enormous reach. You may remember the concept of the "Disinformation Dozen" — 12 individuals who were identified as being responsible for a disproportionate share of anti-vax content spreading online. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was one of them.
Requiring a credential to post in these lanes would, at minimum, limit the megaphones of the highest-impact misinformation accounts.
One of the more interesting pieces: this isn't just "please post your credentials."
That's a real enforcement mechanism, not an honor-system policy.
To be clear, I don't think this solves everything. A few reasons:
Having a medical degree doesn't mean everything you say is correct. There are very credentialed, very misinformed physicians out there — including some of the more absurd anti-vax doctors who have gone viral (I'm thinking of the one who claimed vaccines made metal stick to your head).
A credential is a floor, not a ceiling.
Any time the government is in the position of:
...it's worth being nervous about it. In theory, "free sharing of ideas" is exactly what a healthy society should want. In reality, as we've seen, unchecked misinformation in these specific fields actively harms people. That tension is real and doesn't go away just because one side of it is uncomfortable.
Medicine is clearly sensitive. But what about wellness? Nutrition? Parenting? Home remedies? The scope of what counts as "sensitive" is something governments will inevitably expand over time, which is part of why these laws make people uneasy.
I think the concept — requiring people discussing sensitive, high-stakes topics to post their credentials — is a really interesting and potentially useful idea.
I don't think we'd ever adopt something as restrictive as China's version in the United States, and I'm not sure we should. But I could absolutely see the value in:
That's a much lighter-touch approach than a full-blown restriction, and it still gives viewers the information they need to evaluate what they're seeing.
China's Influencer Law is an interesting test case for one of the defining issues of our time: what do we do about high-impact misinformation in fields where bad information can wreck people's lives?
Fully restricting who can speak is a heavy hammer and comes with real tradeoffs around free expression. But simply requiring transparent credentials for anyone speaking authoritatively on medicine, law, education, or finance? That's an idea I'd be in favor of exploring here.
Good decisions come from good information. And on a platform that reaches hundreds of millions of people, the bar for "information" in high-stakes areas probably should be higher than it is today.