Don’t Make Info‑Middlemen Secret Police

Platforms, markets, and news outlets gather and redistribute information, but we should not impose on them a general duty to police whether every source violated a private secrecy promise. Requiring such policing is practically infeasible (verification, surveillance, liability) and shifts enforcement burdens from principal promise‑holders to public intermediaries. — If regulators demand that information intermediaries enforce private secrecy promises, they will reshape free‑speech norms, chill reporting and market participation, and create a technically intractable compliance regime with large political consequences.