MANILA: A legislative Bill that its authors say will curb online disinformation while protecting the press has cleared the Philippines’ House of Representatives and is now before the Senate. But the journalists and researchers who have spent years documenting disinformation are asking lawmakers to toss the measure.
House Bill No. 9465, the Digital Media Anti-False Information Act, was passed in June by 286 votes to three. Its lead author is House Majority Leader Sandro Marcos, the eldest son of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The latter in February asked Congress to prioritise a Bill against disinformation as long as it was “balanced”.
Under the Bill, anyone convicted of knowingly creating, financing, directing or materially assisting false information intended to cause verifiable public harm or a serious threat to national security faces six to 12 years in prison and fines of up to two million pesos (S$42,110). Undisclosed artificial intelligence-generated images, videos and audio are also covered.
Several other Bills on the same issue have been filed in the Senate, but they remain in limbo. The committee on public information and mass media has yet to start discussing these Bills, having no new chairman following a leadership shake-up in the 24-member Senate in June.
That delay has given the Bill’s opponents an opportunity.
A coalition of civil society groups issued a joint position paper criticising the Bill on July 25, while a separate statement led by the Movement for Media Safety Philippines has drawn signatures from 67 newsrooms and more than 80 journalists.
What they dispute is not the problem, but lawmakers’ proposed remedy: a law that would make the state the arbiter of what is false. This is an issue in a country where fact-checkers have found that coordinated disinformation networks helped put the Marcos administration into office, and where the tools already in the books have a record of being turned on the press.
Criminal libel remains in the Revised Penal Code and was extended to online publications by the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012. It has been used by officials to tie reporters, academics and activists who criticise abusive policies to communist insurgents, in a practice called “red-tagging” in the Philippines.
That history, said veteran investigative journalist Karol Ilagan, chairperson of the Department of Journalism at the University of the Philippines-Diliman, cannot be set aside when reading a Bill this broad.
“We know that there are legitimate measures that get weaponised,” she said.
Justin Daduya of the Manila-based think-tank Sigla Research Centre points to the Bill’s definitions – what counts as “verifiable public harm”, who “materially assists” a disinformation network, among others – as the openings.
“On the surface, this language is comforting,” he said. So was the language of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, he added, which set its own demanding bar for intent and has since been used to prosecute government critics as alleged terrorists by association.
“There are safeguards, and they sound good on paper. In reality, they’re not actually going to stop people in power from targeting everyone who dissents against them, who exposes wrongdoing,” said Daduya.
The younger Marcos, who is representative for the Ilocos Norte 1st District, has not brushed off the criticism.
The concerns are “actually very valid”, he told reporters on July 27.
“I understand that it might be misconstrued as something to do with censorship or using the Bill to weaponise the media,” said the 32-year-old, adding that “we are not here to censor anyone”.
The Bill does contain protections. Conviction requires actual knowledge that the information is false, plus specific intent to cause harm. Journalism, investigative reporting, criticism of government, whistleblowing, satire and academic discourse are all included as exemptions.
Those are what the Bill’s authors point to when the censorship question comes up. But critics say that while this shields those with press accreditation, many others would be vulnerable.
“Even if you say there are exemptions, we are operating on the same universal right. It’s hard to guarantee anything with exemptions like that, because we are also talking about people in general who are exercising their freedom of expression,” Ilagan said.
Some of the Bill’s supporters compare it with Singapore’s Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), in force since 2019.
Jonathan Corpus Ong, who is executive director of Sigla and the researcher whose work first mapped the Philippines’ disinformation-for-hire industry, argues that the transplant does not survive the crossing.
“Singapore is a high-trust society compared with the Philippines, where citizens perceive political elites as highly corrupt and incompetent,” he said.
“Passing a POFMA-style law in the Philippines is misguided and dangerous. How can we trust the politicians who would benefit from legislation that could be used to silence dissenters and activists?”
The officials casting themselves as victims of fake news, he added, are in several cases the same ones facing corruption scandals, and what they are labelling as falsehood is often ordinary public anger.
A 2022 study by researchers at the Philippine Media Monitoring Laboratory found years-long disinformation attempts on social media to whitewash abuses during the nine brutal years of martial law under the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos Sr, the father of President Marcos.
The same researchers said the current president himself benefited from these disinformation efforts when he ran for president in 2022.
Who the Bill can and cannot reach
Another objection is that the Bill penalises only the last man in the chain of information.
Ong’s research traced disinformation campaigns to public relations and digital marketing firms, where politicians work with high-level strategists out of corporate boardrooms.
“The House Bill individualises the issue of disinformation to individual posters and influencers, without addressing the grey economies that plan out and profit from influence operations,” he said.
It punishes individuals for falsehoods “as defined and determined by political incumbents”, he added, and has no strategy for addressing the industrial production of disinformation.
Daduya makes the same point about the penalties: A teenager running AI prompts is just as liable as a troll farm operator.
“You can’t get the platform, you can’t get the disinformer,” he said. “So what do you do? You jail individual disinformers and package that as the solution to the disinformation crisis.”
Social media platforms get off most lightly in the Bill. The House version shields companies unless they knowingly and wilfully assist in producing false content – a bar Daduya says is practically out of reach – and the fines are negligible against platform revenue.
The Senate version is also harder on ordinary users.
While the House version requires proof that the person actually knew the information was false, the Senate version would also cover anyone who merely had reasonable grounds to suspect it, a lower bar that could reach a user who shared a post in good faith.
The Senate version also seeks to create a Digital Media Integrity Council of mostly government agencies able to order takedowns within 48 hours without a court order.
Sigla has drafted an alternative: a platform accountability Bill covering algorithmic, financial and content moderation transparency, with independent auditors given access to platform data around elections. It is appealing to senators to heed its call for amendments to the Bill.
The anti-disinformation measure’s target, Daduya said, should be amplification rather than truth or falsehood.
“Most of the time the issue isn’t the fact that you’re telling a lie. It’s that you can amplify the lie a thousand, a million times over through inauthentic accounts,” he said.
It remains to be seen if legislators will heed the advocates’ call. Time is not on their side. Congress adjourns before campaigning for the 2028 presidential polls builds, and a measure the President has listed as a priority rarely sits still for long once a committee finds a chairman. - The Straits Times/ANN
