The anti-fake news bill rejects all the research

Over the past year, academics and journalists have given our best efforts to provide evidence to legislators that anti-fake news bills can actually do more harm than good. While my own research “Architects of Networked Disinformation” has exposed the local disinformation economies that profit from falsehoods, passing legislation that would grant political authorities powers to fine and even jail citizens for their online speech pose a bigger threat to our civil liberties than the problem it claims to solve.

In other words, House Bill No. 9465 misunderstands one decade of Philippines disinformation research as well as global case studies of digital repression. While cloaked in the moral justification of fighting falsehoods, this bill is, at its core, a censorship bill. Applying an overbroad definition of “fake news,” the bill would give political authorities special levers for social media content takedowns, and penalties to ordinary citizens for sharing material they deem false or harmful.

This bill’s premise thus ignores the main thesis of global disinformation research, which can be summarized as follows: “disinformation comes from the top, not (just) from ordinary citizens,” and “politicians themselves are the funders and beneficiaries of disinformation.” It is telling that the bill ignores structural and process regulatory approaches that researchers have previously recommended, favoring a content-focused approach based on arbitrations of leaving-up or taking-down specific material.

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Indeed, we should be worried that legislators are justifying the passing of an anti-fake news bill with their own personal narratives of victimhood. Politicians behind the bill have fancied themselves the victims of lies, rumors, and criticisms not only from ordinary citizens but from journalists as well. We could not separate these victimhood narratives from the bill’s premise and design. House Bill No. 9465’s lack of precise language and definition of fake news is not an honest mistake; it is intentional. The vagueness is baked into its design in order to grant political authorities powers to act as “primary arbiters of truth,” who could lump dissent into disinformation, and activism as troll behavior.

Regional wave of digital repression

The Philippines’ anti-fake news bill is in many ways a copycat of our neighboring countries’ attempts to use the law to exert greater control over public expression on social media.

In 2019, Singapore had passed POFMA (Protection Against Online Falsehoods and Misinformation Act), criticized by academics as a “new form of authoritarian information control.” Meanwhile, Thailand’s 2016 Computer Cyber-Crime Act augments their older Criminal Code to increase penalties against those who criticize the royal family. In 2024, an opposition politician was convicted of violating both laws, prompting digital rights groups to call out the “draconian nature” of these laws intended to stifle dissent and express legitimate criticism against the government.

Thai political scientist Janjira Sombatpoonsiri has long studied these transnational trends and called them “weaponized lawfare.” She had observed that autocratic and autocratizing governments “learn from each other” on how to combine perfectly legal mechanisms with more insidious online armies to intimidate their opponents and consolidate control.

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It is curious that the Philippines’ House Bill No. 9465 gained new momentum in the wake of youth-led anti-corruption movements not just in the country but in the broader region. Just as Gen Z activists learned from each other and amplified each other’s causes–from Indonesia’s shaming of #NepoBabies to our own anti-corruption #TrillionPesoMarch in 2025–we observe political elites across countries learning strategies of digital repression. With our national elections looming in 2028, Filipino political elites would be motivated to copy-paste tools of repression from the regional autocratic playbook.

From chilling effects toward transparency and accountability

While House Bill No. 9465 is foundationally flawed, it does not mean that there are no legislative frameworks that could address disinformation at its roots. In fact, my colleagues at Sigla Research Center, working with a broad alliance of media and civil groups, have worked hard to engage legislators and propose amendments that would mitigate any chilling effects to political speech.

First, legislation should pivot away from content regulation in favor of amplification regulation. The current bill’s focus on the truth or falsity of individual content ignores research on influence operations that identifies the illicit economies of inauthentic coordination networks and paid troll armies hiding in plain sight. Rather than having to rely on the State to decide on what is true, a future version of the bill should restructure liability around conduct: financing, directing, or operating influencer armies and troll farms.

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Second, legislation can establish transparency and accountability measures toward Big Tech companies by enlisting independent experts to take the lead in reviews. A technical body with diverse representation across subject matter as well as region and identity should be empowered to audit platform algorithms and identify potential risks in our information environment. Rather than centering politicians’ grievances and victimhood performances, this group should adopt a rights-based framework sensitive to diverse communities’ vulnerabilities in terms of class, age, gender, and region.

Finally, legislation should be forward-looking and develop media, digital, and AI literacy programs targeted to diverse populations. Long-term resilience, not one-time takedowns, is what will ultimately determine whether Filipinos are equipped to navigate an information environment that will keep evolving after any single bill is passed.

About the author: Jonathan Corpus Ong is Professor of Communication in the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, co-author of the study “Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Fake News Production in the Philippines”, cited as among the “most valuable” research in disinformation studies by the Poynter Institute.