Media, rights groups urge Congress to junk Marcos anti-disinfo bill

MANILA, Philippines — Civil society groups and rights advocates are urging the Senate to defer pending anti-disinformation bills that they say borrow language from the Anti-Terrorism Act and hand the government powers that “may be weaponized by whoever holds office.”

The groups said they support action against disinformation — many of them having reported or been victimized by it — but argued the current bills only target small-time spreaders while going soft on social media companies.

"What the bill does is leave a sword of Damocles to frighten the free expression of the people," said Justin Daduya of Sigla Research Center during a public discussion of the bills with other civil society groups and media organizations.

“[While safeguard provisions] sound well on paper, as we’ve seen, for example, in the Anti-Terror Law, consistently these provisions don’t hold up when it comes to the implementation,” Daduya said.

The bill’s provisions, Daduya warned, are “easy to weaponize against normal activists or even news organizations that speak truth to power."

House Bill 9465, or the Digital Media Anti-False Information Act, hurdled third and final reading in June, some three months after being listed as a Marcos priority measure.

The bill lists as its author House Majority Leader Sandro Marcos, the president's eldest son. The measure passed 286-3 with seven abstentions.

Its Senate counterpart remains at the committee level under the Committee on Public Information and Mass Media, which has yet to have a new chair under Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself called on lawmakers in February to prioritize the anti-disinformation measure, saying it should be “balanced” and must not curtail freedom of expression.

Anticipating that Marcos could again push for the bill’s passage in Monday’s State of the Nation Address, at least a dozen civil society groups and media organizations released a joint statement on Saturday, July 25, opposing the measures.

Curtailing right to free speech

"These measures pose a far greater threat to the public's freedom of expression than to the disinformation economies they purport to dismantle," the coalition of advocates said in its joint statement.

Both bills extend criminal liability to those who "materially assist" disinformation — language the groups said parallels the terrorist financing provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, which has "consistently been used for prosecution by association."

The Senate version criminalizes publishing content while merely "knowing or having a reasonable belief" of its falsity — "an incredibly low bar," according to the groups' joint statement.

The House version sets stricter standards, requiring actual knowledge of falsity and specific intent to cause verifiable public harm.

But the groups called these "empty words" that read well on paper while doing little to prevent legal harassment in practice.

Violators face six to 12 years in prison, with heavier penalties if the offender is a media personality — a provision Carlos Nazareno, director for rights at Democracy.net.ph, said could have a chilling effect on journalists.

"As shown in the dangerous cyber libel provisions in the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 and the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, it is extremely difficult to repeal or amend bad laws in our country," Nazareno said. "Prevention is far easier than the cure."

Soft on platforms, hard on users

The coalition said neither bill has credible enforcement against the platforms that design and profit from disinformation.

Fines are “a drop in the bucket of big tech’s earnings,” and the House version includes a liability shield insulating companies unless they knowingly, actively, and materially participated in creating false content.

"Experience tells us that's an insurmountable bar,” Daduya said.

Meanwhile, the Senate version’s Digital Media Integrity Council — composed almost entirely of government agencies — can order content taken down within 48 hours without a judicial warrant, on its own finding that a complaint “has sufficient basis.”

The bills also flatten the distinction between an ordinary citizen who shares a false post and the operators of coordinated troll farms, the groups said.

“A law that punishes a retweet and a coordinated troll farm operation under functionally the same legal theory is not calibrated to the architecture of disinformation,” the groups' position paper read.

**Senate urged to correct **

The groups' main demand is for the Senate to junk the House version of the bill and get to work on a new measure in consultation with civil society.

Among its recommendations is to split the "overly broad" House bill into more specific measures: a narrow security law on coordinated inauthentic behavior, a separate platform accountability bill, and standalone media literacy legislation with its own funding.

They also proposed regulating amplification rather than content — going after the financing and operation of troll farms and influence-for-hire networks instead of individual posts — along with an independent body to audit platform algorithms and a civil society-led council on digital rights.

"It is not the government's job to be the arbiter of truth, to provide official narratives of what societies look like," Daduya said. "That's a very dangerous proposition."

Journalists have joined the pushback.

A separate statement initiated by the alliance Movement for Media Safety Philippines has gathered signatures from 67 news organizations and more than 80 journalists as of Saturday, said Rowena Paraan, training director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

Fact-checkers and researchers widely documented that Marcos was the primary beneficiary of a massive, coordinated disinformation campaign that rehabilitated his family's political image and denigrated his rivals during the 2022 elections.

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