The Censorship Bubble: Media Economics, Regulatory Failure, and the Slow Strangulation of Independent Journalism in Ukraine

The fight against disinformation, fake news, hostile propaganda, and “harmful content” has become the legal and moral scaffolding on which governments — from the United States and United Kingdom to Ukraine, Hungary, and Georgia — are erecting new media regulation regimes. Paradoxically, these regimes often produce, as a secondary consequence, the destruction of the very independent voices they claim to defend.

This article offers an analytical framework for understanding that paradox, drawing on foundational works in media economics (Robert Picard, James Hamilton, Philip Napoli), the political economy of the press (Ben Bagdikian, C. Edwin Baker, Victor Pickard), the theory of regulatory capture (George Stigler), concepts of information fragmentation (Eli Pariser, Cass Sunstein), and contemporary scholarship on journalist safety and media capture (Julie Posetti, Anya Schiffrin, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi). In the final section I apply this framework to the Ukrainian case — from the oligarchic television landscape of the 2010s and the sanctions against Medvedchuk’s channels, to the “United News” telethon, USAID grant dependency, and legislative initiatives such as those advanced by Member of Parliament Yaroslav Yurchyshyn to de-anonymize Telegram channels.

The article’s thesis is simple and deliberately provocative: state attempts to “regulate” the information space under the banner of fighting disinformation — even in wartime — structurally increase media dependence on power and grant-makers, transform the information market into a quasi-monopoly, and convert the “filter bubble” (Pariser) from an algorithmic artifact into a product of deliberate state policy. The result is not the defeat of disinformation but the emergence of what I call the censorship bubble: an information environment in which the official narrative sounds loudest precisely because the alternatives have been financially and administratively eliminated.

The Economics of Information: Why News Is a Peculiar Commodity

News as a Public Good and the Fundamental Market Failure

Contemporary media economics begins from an acknowledgment that news — particularly local, investigative, and political journalism — is a classic public good: non-rival in consumption (your reading an article does not diminish its availability to me) and non-excludable (keeping out free-riders is nearly impossible). This characteristic generates a fundamental market failure: the market systematically undersupplies quality journalism because its benefits are largely external while its costs are private.

Robert G. Picard, Hamrin Professor of Media Economics and emeritus fellow at the Reuters Institute (Oxford), established in Media Economics: Concepts and Issues (Sage, 1989) and The Economics and Financing of Media Companies that media companies operate simultaneously in two markets — the product market (content for audiences) and the service market (audience attention for advertisers). As he documented, the advertising model sustained the golden age of the twentieth-century press but created the illusion that journalism could subsist as a purely private enterprise. Picard also showed that state subsidies, designed to correct for market failure, often “fail to address the underlying economic problems of the press, tend to diminish over time, and dependency on subsidies harms the ability of outlets to improve and grow.”

James T. Hamilton, Hearst Professor of Communication at Stanford, carried this logic to its conclusion in the landmark All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton University Press, 2004 — winner of the Frank Luther Mott Award). What appears in news, Hamilton demonstrated, is determined by the “five Ws” of news economics: who cares about the information, what they are willing to pay, where they can be reached, when they consume content, and at what cost. Drawing on data from NBC, ABC, and CBS from 1969 to 1998, Hamilton showed that deregulation, cable competition, and ownership changes drove a systematic shift from hard news (politics, international affairs) to soft news (celebrity, human interest) — because that logic attracts the marginal viewer. His conclusion was unambiguous: addressing the economics of news more fully requires lowering the cost of accessing public information, strengthening the role of non-commercial publishers, and expanding author rights — not centralizing control.

In the follow-up Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism (Harvard University Press, 2016 — Goldsmith Book Prize), Hamilton calculated that every dollar invested in an investigative story generates hundreds of dollars of social return: legislation changed, officials removed, corruption reduced. The catch is that these gains accrue to the entire community, not to those who finance the journalism. Investigative reporting thus represents the largest and most chronic market failure in the information economy.

Victor Pickard, C. Edwin Baker Professor at the Annenberg School (University of Pennsylvania), states the case most sharply in Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press, 2020): “A systemic market failure afflicting our news industries requires policy interventions and public alternatives.” Pickard insists that the journalism crisis and the proliferation of disinformation share a common root — “over-reliance on advertising revenue and a dominant commercial logic.” His prescription is a public (not state) media system structurally removed from the market: “Significant sectors of media need to be taken out of the market entirely. Public goods were never meant to be treated as mere commodities.”

Concentration and the Media Monopoly: Bagdikian’s Legacy

If Pickard describes the present phase of the crisis, its historical architecture was constructed by Ben Bagdikian, Pulitzer Prize laureate and dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His The Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, 1983; seventh edition The New Media Monopoly, 2004) established the paradigm. In 1983, Bagdikian recorded, fifty corporations controlled the majority of American media; by 1987, twenty-nine; by 1997, ten; by 2004, just five (Time Warner, Disney, News Corp, Viacom, Bertelsmann). His celebrated formulation — “media power is political power” — has lost none of its relevance.

Less quoted but more consequential is another Bagdikian observation: “If a nation has narrowly controlled information, it will soon have narrowly controlled politics.” And: “Only local journalism can adequately cover local problems and candidates; otherwise, voters become captives of the only alternative information — paid political propaganda — or they receive no information at all.” This sentence deserves to be inscribed: when a state destroys local or alternative media under any pretext, it literally transforms voters into “captives of propaganda” — even when that propaganda seems, to the state itself, entirely correct.

C. Edwin Baker, Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, formulated the “democratic principle of communicative power distribution” in Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Democracy, for Baker, “calls for the widest possible dispersal of power in the public sphere.” Dispersed ownership is not merely an antitrust requirement but a normative foundation of democracy: only a decentralized media structure provides (1) democratic distribution of communicative power, (2) protection against media power abuse, and (3) the likelihood that owners will pursue journalistic and civic goals rather than the bottom line. Baker deployed these arguments directly against the FCC’s deregulatory doctrine and market fundamentalism as such.

Algorithmic Market Failure and the New Context

Philip M. Napoli, James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy at Duke University’s Sanford School, extended the market failure framework to platforms in Audience Evolution (Columbia University Press, 2011) and especially in Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age (Columbia University Press, 2019). Napoli introduces the concept of the “algorithmic marketplace of ideas” and demonstrates that the news economy built on Facebook, Google, and TikTok constitutes a market failure: platforms enjoy the advantages of media companies (editorial control, audience aggregation) and the protections of telecommunications common carriers (Section 230) while bearing none of the regulatory obligations of traditional media outlets. This asymmetry, Napoli argues, cannot be resolved by antitrust instruments alone; it requires a redefinition of “public interest” in media regulation.

Taken together, the theorists of media economics yield two propositions that are essential to our argument. First: markets undersupply quality journalism because it is a public good. Second: any intervention — subsidies, regulation, antitrust pressure — must be designed so that it does not reinforce the very concentration and dependency that created the problem in the first place. The second proposition raises the fundamental question: is the state — especially a state at war — capable of designing such regulation? The answer from economists and political economists of regulation is largely skeptical.

The Failures of Media Regulation and the Theory of Regulatory Capture

Stigler and the Economics of Regulation

George J. Stigler’s canonical article “The Theory of Economic Regulation” (Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 1971) remains the most cited work in the political economy of regulation. Its central thesis — that “as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit” — launched an entire discipline. Stigler, the 1982 Nobel laureate in economics, grounded his argument in public choice theory and Mancur Olson’s model of collective action: small, concentrated producer groups have stronger incentives and lower organizational transaction costs than dispersed consumers, so regulators systematically arrive at conclusions that favor large incumbents. Sam Peltzman’s later reformulation (1976; 2022) refined this: Stigler overstated how reliably industry dominates regulation, but “once regulation is established, industry interest plays a disproportionate role in its design.”

For the media sphere, Stigler’s thesis has direct application. The regulator — a broadcasting council, an FCC, or a newly created “disinformation oversight body” — confronts well-organized, large media companies, oligarchic groups, and political parties with concentrated interests, and a dispersed public that bears none of the lobbying costs. The result is predictable: rules that formally proclaim “public interest protection” and “disinformation control” in practice protect large incumbents from competition, exclude inconvenient voices, and produce a landscape dominated by power-loyal structures.

Media Capture: When the Media Themselves Are Captured

Where Stigler described how industry captures the regulator, more recent literature on media capture describes the reverse dynamic — the capture of media organizations themselves by external forces. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi in “Freedom without Impartiality: The Vicious Circle of Media Capture” (in Media Transformations in the Post-Communist World, eds. Peter Gross and Karol Jakubowicz, Lexington Books, 2013) defines media capture as a condition in which “media lack autonomy and are incapable of fulfilling their primary role of informing the public.” In the post-socialist context, she stresses, “capture of the media is not necessarily capture by the state”; the groups that capture media “have already captured the state or aspire to do so, so media capture — of public or private media — should be seen as an accompaniment of state capture.”

Mungiu-Pippidi decomposes media capture into four components: regulatory capture (in Stigler’s sense); control over public broadcasters; the use of state financing as a control instrument; and ownership capture through loyal beneficiaries. All four are visible, in varying degrees, in contemporary Ukraine.

Anya Schiffrin (Columbia SIPA), in the edited volume Media Capture: How Money, Digital Platforms, and Governments Control the News (Columbia University Press, 2021), extended the concept to the digital era, showing how Google and Facebook platform economics and data aggregation services generate new forms of “soft censorship.” Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, contributing to the same volume, argues that in the digital age media capture occurs not through direct pressure but through the structural dependence of newsrooms on distribution algorithms and grant-makers.

The Subsidies Trap

Of particular relevance to our argument is the analysis of media subsidies. Picard observes: “Although subsidies are generally undesirable from freedom of expression and economic logic standpoints, they are sometimes necessary to pursue social and cultural objectives not served by markets. However, dependency on subsidies harms the ability of outlets to improve and grow… and creates dependency on handouts.”

This economic logic becomes a political threat when subsidies are distributed opaquely or through political filters. As noted by Damian Tambini in “A Theory of Media Freedom” (Journal of Media Law, 2021): “any attempt to create new interventions — new public financing models, subsidies, levies, co-participation institutions — inevitably has the potential to create institutions that in future may themselves become vectors of state capture of media.”

Reporters Without Borders, in its World Press Freedom Index 2025, singles out the economic indicator as having reached an unprecedented critical minimum: “Without economic independence, there can be no free press. When media are financially exhausted, they become prey for oligarchs and state officials seeking to exploit them.” RSF documents this pattern in Georgia, where “foreign influence laws are used to suppress independent journalism,” and in Hong Kong, where “state subsidies are channeled to pro-government outlets.”

Regulatory Capture in the Age of “Fighting Disinformation”

The contemporary context provides a textbook illustration of how regulation that presents itself as protecting the information space risks becoming capture. When governments introduce laws on “de-anonymization,” “blogger registration,” “disinformation blocking,” or “unified information policy,” they create precisely the institutional architecture Stigler described: a discretionary body empowered to determine which content is “legitimate” and which is not.

As Tambini notes, this risk is not hypothetical: “Preventing states from doing bad things to media may simultaneously prevent them from doing good things to support it.” But Tambini’s converse conclusion is equally clear: any preferences — tax, competitive, or licensing — must be granted “openly and transparently, not in backroom deals.” Without this, interventions will always risk becoming, in Stigler’s terms, acquired regulation — acquired by power-loyal media groups, or by the executive itself, as an instrument against opposition.

The Censorship Bubble: How Destroying Independent Media Creates the Very Problem “Disinformation Wars” Are Supposed to Solve

Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: Pariser and Sunstein

Eli Pariser in The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (Penguin Press, 2011) introduced the concept that has become central to understanding contemporary information fragmentation. The filter bubble is the personalization effect of search and social media algorithms, whereby “users get less exposure to conflicting viewpoints and are intellectually isolated in their own information bubble.” Pariser illustrated this with the now-famous example of two demographically similar users who search for “BP” immediately after the Deepwater Horizon disaster and receive radically different results — one sees investment news, the other sees investigative journalism about the spill.

Cass R. Sunstein (Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard Law School) developed the argument across a trilogy: Republic.com (2001), Republic.com 2.0 (2007), and #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton University Press, 2017). Sunstein coined the concepts of “information cocoons” and the “Daily Me” — a personalized newspaper in which each reader sees only what confirms existing beliefs. “In a well-functioning democracy,” Sunstein writes in #Republic, “people do not live in echo chambers or information cocoons.” Democracy requires what he calls an “architecture of serendipity” — unexpected exposure to topics and ideas one would not have chosen. Without such serendipitous structure, society fragments, polarization intensifies, and the shared experiences and facts on which democratic deliberation depends dissolve.

Why State “Disinformation Wars” Generate Their Own Bubbles

Pariser’s and Sunstein’s logic is typically applied to the private sector — to Facebook or Google algorithms. But it has no less powerful validity when applied to state policy. When a state, under the pretext of fighting disinformation:

• financially blocks oppositional or critical outlets,
• monopolizes prime-time television through a single telethon,
• establishes bodies with de facto powers to block “harmful content,”
• deploys anti-oligarch legislation as an instrument against political opponents,
• compels channel operators to register and reveal their identities -

it creates not a pluralistic information ecosystem but a homogenized “state Daily Me,” in which the information diet is determined not by Facebook’s algorithm but by political will. This is what I propose to call the censorship bubble: an effect of fragmentation and intellectual isolation that arises not from an excess of choices (as in Pariser) but from their administrative elimination.

This construction has one further sinister consequence. When the state’s official narrative becomes the sole source of “legitimate” information, audiences that distrust that narrative inevitably migrate to unregulated channels — anonymous Telegram feeds, Russian propaganda resources, fringe YouTube streams. Pickard warned in 2018 that “the disinformation society” forms precisely where the commercial collapse of journalism coincides with a vacuum of public alternatives. Add to that formula the state destruction of private alternatives, and a perfect storm results: the official narrative monopolizes the legal space while the genuinely disinformative occupy the informal one.

Journalist Safety and the Chilling Effect

The censorship bubble has not only a structural-economic but also a deeply personal dimension. Julie Posetti (Professor of Journalism at City, University of London; Reuters Institute Research Associate; ICFJ Global Director of Research) — in Online Violence Against Women Journalists: A Global Snapshot (UNESCO, 2020), The Chilling: Global Trends in Online Violence Against Women Journalists (UNESCO/ICFJ, 2021), and the training handbook Journalism, ‘Fake News’ & Disinformation (UNESCO, 2018, co-edited with Cherilyn Ireton) — systematically documents how online violence, coordinated disinformation campaigns, and legal persecution create a chilling effect: journalists pre-emptively self-censor or exit the profession.

The Chilling, based on a survey of 901 women journalists from 125 countries and in-depth interviews with 173 experts, found that 73% had experienced online violence and 20% reported offline attacks they attributed to their online targeting. Posetti stresses that such campaigns “are often connected to broader disinformation operations aimed at undermining trust in factual journalism” and that “populist and authoritarian politicians are frequently simultaneously distributors of disinformation.” The logic is devastating: the very politicians who indict “disinformation” are often its vectors, while authentic journalists are delegitimized by that same discourse.

The Ukrainian Case: From Oligarchic Television to the Censorship Bubble

Structural Background: 75 Percent of Media Owned by Politicians and Oligarchs

The Ukrainian media economy from the 1990s until 2022 was a textbook case of oligarchic capture in Mungiu-Pippidi’s terms. According to the Institute of Mass Information and Reporters Without Borders monitoring data from 2016, roughly 75% of Ukrainian media belonged to politicians and oligarchs. Four media groups — StarLightMedia (Viktor Pinchuk, ~21.68% audience), 1+1 Media (Ihor Kolomoisky, ~20.49%), Inter Media Group (Dmytro Firtash and Serhiy Lyovochkin, ~21.42%), and Media Group Ukraine (Rinat Akhmetov, ~12.66%) — concentrated over 75% of the television audience.

Ukrainian economic analysts at the Centre for Economic Strategy (2023) calculated that oligarchs spent cumulatively over one billion dollars on their television channels across two decades — and that is a conservative estimate. This is the Bagdikian scenario written large: media as instruments of political power, not as businesses. RSF’s assessment of Ukraine in 2024 is blunt: “Although some media are controlled by oligarchs, their influence has diminished since 24 February 2022, and the state has become the central player in the media landscape.” The transition from oligarchic to state control — in Mungiu-Pippidi’s terms — is not liberation from media capture; it is a change of captor.

The 2021 Sanctions Precedent: Medvedchuk’s Channels

On February 2, 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky enacted a National Security and Defense Council decision imposing sanctions on MP Taras Kozak and entities controlling television channels 112 Ukraine, NewsOne, and ZIK — a media holding unofficially linked to Viktor Medvedchuk. The channels were immediately pulled from the air; YouTube subsequently geo-blocked their accounts at the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy’s request. The United States endorsed the decree as “countering Russian influence.” The EU reacted more cautiously, noting that “Ukraine has the right to combat disinformation, but questions of freedom of speech require more detailed study.”

The critical issue in this precedent is not the substance of the decision (the channels’ transmission of Russian propaganda talking points had been documented by Detector Media’s monitoring) but the mechanism. Sanctions were imposed by Presidential decree on the basis of an NSDC decision — without court proceedings, without public presentation of evidence, against a Ukrainian citizen. Legal scholars immediately warned of a dangerous precedent: the NSDC and the President had acted as though they possessed unlimited discretion to determine what was right and what was not.

This mechanism — the extrajudicial removal of media market players by a security body decision, formally motivated by “public interest” — is a textbook case of what Stigler and Mungiu-Pippidi describe as the risk of regulatory capture: executive discretionary authority over the market that can be applied selectively.

The “United News” Telethon: Institutionalizing the Bubble

The clearest example of the structural transformation of Ukraine’s information space during the war is the “United News #UAразом” telethon, launched in March 2022 under a Presidential decree. Uniting the 24/7 broadcast of the major national television channels, the marathon was initially understood as a justified emergency measure in the context of information warfare.

However, already by April 2022 — without any publicly disclosed legal basis — three television channels (“5 Kanal,” “Pryamyi,” and “Espreso,” associated with opposition and former President Petro Poroshenko) were disconnected from the digital terrestrial network (T2) operated by the state broadcaster Concern RRT. The National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine officially stated that it had adopted no decision to disconnect them. The US State Department’s 2023 Human Rights Report (April 2024) noted directly: “The national television marathon enabled an unprecedented level of control over prime-time television news. Some media reported that as early as spring 2022 they were deprived of lucrative terrestrial broadcasting contracts and subjected to pressure from the Presidential Office.” In October 2024 the European Commission, in its enlargement communiqué, expressed “concerns about the state budget financing of the telethon and its objectivity” and called on Ukraine to “restore a pluralistic media landscape.”

The economic dimension is equally instructive. According to Detector Media:

• In 2024 the state spent approximately 843 million hryvnias on “United News” and “FreeДом” (699 million and 144 million respectively).
• For 2026, 637.8 million hryvnias are allocated to “United News” (contracts split between My-Ukraine LLC, 1+1, SLM, and Inter).
• From March 2022 to April 2026, producers of both marathons received in total nearly 3 billion hryvnias of public funds.

From 79th place in 2023, Ukraine rose to 61st in RSF’s Press Freedom Index 2024, partly on security indicators — but IMI Director Oksana Romanyuk publicly stated that “she disagrees with RSF’s assessment,” because “freedom of speech in Ukraine began deteriorating in 2023: the state initiated surveillance of investigative journalists, and information became less accessible.”

USAID and Grant Dependency: When Aid Becomes Vulnerability

On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending all US foreign assistance programs for ninety days. By Romanyuk’s estimate, “practically 80% or possibly more of Ukrainian media had worked with USAID,” with grants covering up to 100% of some newsrooms’ budgets, and 40–60% for many others. Bihus.Info reported that “USAID covered about two-thirds of our projects.” Ukrainska Pravda: approximately 10% of its editorial staff costs.

An IMI survey conducted in May 2025 found that 29% of Ukrainian media were in a survival mode (versus 8% in January 2025), and one-third had no strategy for finding new funding sources. Since the full-scale invasion began, 329 Ukrainian media outlets have closed.

This case illustrates the trap described by Picard, Pickard, and Mungiu-Pippidi. The grant model, which sustained Ukrainian independent journalism for decades in the face of oligarchic capture in the private sector, proved vulnerable in two dimensions. First, a single external donor decision paralyzed a third of the sector (functional vulnerability). Second, the most obvious path for newsrooms — replacing donor financing with state financing — means only moving from one form of dependency to another (structural vulnerability). This is the classic captured media scenario: when state funding displaces grant funding, editorial autonomy that was maintained through donor diversity risks ceding to a single structure of influence.

Yurchyshyn and Anonymous Telegram Channels: How a Technically Unworkable Idea Becomes a Legitimizing Tool

A striking example of the problems embedded in such legislative initiatives is the proposals advanced by Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Freedom of Speech (Voice party), concerning the de-anonymization of Telegram channels. Yurchyshyn has consistently proposed (2024–2026):

• Requiring Telegram channel owners “above a certain subscriber count” to disclose their identity and register as media entities;
• In case of non-compliance, petitioning Telegram’s administration for blocking;
• Adopting a “specialized disinformation law” that “reduces the level of anonymity” in the messenger;
• In February 2026, calling for an outright ban on Telegram in Ukraine as part of “decolonization from Russian influence.”

Technically, implementation of this idea is virtually impossible. Telegram, as Yurchyshyn himself acknowledged in an interview with Detector Media (December 2025), has no legally verifiable office in Ukraine; even the State Tax Service cannot determine which of the dozen registered legal entities bearing the name “Telegram” represents the platform. Pavel Durov historically cooperates only in terrorism and narcotics matters. The bill (№11115, registered March 2024, still unscrutinized) is therefore structurally incapable of achieving its stated objective.

What does it do, then? From Stigler’s and Mungiu-Pippidi’s perspective, the answer is clear: it creates a legitimizing framework for the selective blocking of content that will be classified as “disinformation” by “anonymous” channels — according to criteria that the state itself sets. This is the Stiglerian capture architecture: a discretionary instrument, formally motivated by public interest, that will inevitably be applied asymmetrically.

Particularly troubling is the fact that Yurchyshyn himself, in an interview with Telegraf (December 2025), acknowledged: “The influence of oligarchs persists. On channels like ‘Inter’ and ‘My-Ukraine,’ there has most likely been added state influence. Former owners have in effect shared media assets with representatives of the ruling team.” In other words, the chairman of the Committee on Freedom of Speech himself recognizes that de-oligarchization resulted in a transition from private to state-private capture — and simultaneously advocates legislation that can only reinforce it.

The Censorship Bubble, Ukrainian Style: A Structural Anatomy

Assembling all the elements of the Ukrainian case through the analytical framework built in sections 1–3:

Stigler dimension (regulatory capture): Presidential Decree №43/2021 — extrajudicial blocking of three media holdings; Law №5599 “On De-oligarchization” with undefined criteria; the Media Law with expanded National Council powers lacking a legislative definition of “disinformation”; Yurchyshyn’s Telegram de-anonymization proposals.

Bagdikian dimension (concentration): Transition from four oligarchic media groups to de facto dominance of state and quasi-state broadcasters within the telethon structure (190 million hryvnias to My-Ukraine LLC, 142 million to SLM, 139 million to 1+1).

Pickard dimension (market failure): 329 outlets closed since February 2022; 29% of media in survival mode after USAID suspension; no structural alternatives to the advertising-grant model have been introduced.

Posetti dimension (journalist safety): SBU surveillance of the Bihus.Info team (January 2024); pressure on outlets that deviate from “unified information policy.”

Pariser/Sunstein dimension (bubble): Removal of three television channels from the terrestrial digital network without legal basis; concentration of prime-time television in a single politically managed pool; paradoxical audience migration into Telegram — the same space then accused of being the primary vector of disinformation.

This is the censorship bubble: an information environment in which the state, fighting “disinformation” in one segment, creates structural conditions for an unprecedented strengthening of a homogeneous official narrative and simultaneously generates an unregulated underground information market. Sunstein’s logic about “information cocoons” receives here an inverted confirmation: when the architecture of serendipity is dismantled not by algorithms but by administrative decisions, democratic deliberation faces a double threat.

Conclusions: Why Economic Logic Defeats Political Intentions

None of the academic schools engaged in this analysis — from Stigler’s market liberalism to Baker’s and Pickard’s structural democratism — provides grounds for believing that a state at war can design a “neutral” regime for fighting disinformation. On the contrary: all the central concepts converge on a single point.

Quality journalism is a public good suffering from systemic market failure (Picard, Hamilton, Pickard). Resolving this through commercial advertising is structurally impossible — the model is broken. Media concentration is a political threat (Bagdikian, Baker) — whether the concentration is private-oligarchic or state-controlled. Regulation motivated by “public interest” is, as a rule, acquired by organized players and deployed against the dispersed public and political opponents (Stigler, Peltzman). Media capture in post-communist societies takes four standard forms, of which the regulatory and financial are the most dangerous (Mungiu-Pippidi, Schiffrin). Persecution of journalists and selective law enforcement generate a chilling effect that destroys the very structure of informational pluralism (Posetti). And information cocoons undermine democracy not only when formed by algorithms — especially when formed by political will (Pariser, Sunstein).

Ukraine as of spring 2026 occupies a position almost precisely described by this framework: a war of survival is being fought in parallel with a quiet administrative transformation of the media market that, in terms of media economics, does not overcome oligarchic dependency but transfers it — from private beneficiaries to a state monostructure, with partial compensation through a grant-based, and therefore equally dependent, system.

The conclusion of this analysis does not lead to the moralistic position of “do nothing.” Picard, Pickard, Hamilton, and Baker are unanimous that public intervention is necessary. But all of them — and this is the essential point — insist on three conditions: transparent rules, institutional autonomy of the regulator from the executive branch, and diversification of funding sources. None of these conditions is currently met in Ukraine.

The alternative to the censorship bubble is not deregulation but the redesign of interventions so that they do not create the Stiglerian institution of acquired regulation. Concrete recommendations that follow from the academic literature:

• Transfer funding of public media from direct budget transfers to legislatively protected long-term mechanisms (the BBC or Scandinavian public service media model), as Pickard advocates in “Reimagining American Public Media.”
• Diversify support for independent journalism through multiple donors and an autonomous fund, as Picard recommends in his research on charitable status models.
• Enshrine in law a precise definition of disinformation and criteria for its identification — because without this, the National Council, the SBU, and the NSDC hold powers that, by Stigler’s theory, will inevitably be captured.
• Create institutional safeguards in the spirit of Sunstein’s “architecture of serendipity” — from mandatory editorial diversity quotas in public broadcasters to support for local media.
• Decline to adopt messenger de-anonymization legislation without robust procedural safeguards that exclude its use against journalistic sources and critical voices.

Democracy, as Baker wrote, requires “the widest possible dispersal of communicative power.” War does not cancel that principle — it makes it more critical. If Ukraine emerges from this war with the formal institutions of pluralism intact but their internal architecture structurally homogeneous, it will have replicated the worst of the scenarios Mungiu-Pippidi describes: “freedom without impartiality,” a public sphere in which everyone speaks but only the permitted are heard. In that case, victory over the external enemy will have coincided with defeat in the internal battle — for the very democracy in whose name the war is fought.