Snake oil measure

Fake news exists, and nobody disputes that as troll farms distort elections, manipulate screenshots and manufacture fictitious quotes.

House Bill 9465 is an offered cure that can prove more dangerous than the disease of disinformation.

The measure seeks to make it a crime to publish, disseminate, finance, or “materially assist” in the spread of false information that cause “verifiable public harm” or threaten national security.

It sprinted through the committee level, giving the lower chamber barely time to read it, let alone debate it.

This was the opposite of how Congress and the administration disposed of the Freedom of Information Act, which had gathered dust after two decades of delay.

Among the provisions of HB 9465 that are drawing the most scrutiny is one that would criminalize spreading false information on behalf of or under the direction of a foreign state or a foreign-funded influence operation.

Under international human rights law, the Philippines is bound by Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which it ratified in 1986.

The UN Human Rights Committee has held that any restriction on free expression must be narrowly defined, necessary, and proportionate, and formulated with enough precision that people can understand what conduct it prohibits.

Rights groups warned this could ensnare individuals and organizations that share information about legitimate engagements with foreign officials.

The problem is not that the bill wants to punish liars but that “false information” is not something the state can be trusted to adjudicate, particularly in a country notorious for selective justice.

IBON Foundation has objected to the law, raising the most common sense argument. Is the economy actually improving? Is poverty declining or just being measured differently? Is the debt sustainable?

These are not settled facts waiting to be fact-checked.

The questions are subject to interpretation, as they are mainly disputes between people looking at the same numbers and drawing different conclusions.

A government that can criminalize “false” economic claims is a government that can criminalize the wrong kind of information simply by deciding whose math counts.

The bill’s defenders point to its carve-outs for satire, journalism and honest mistakes, which remain in danger of being litigated.

The timing, which the bill’s authors would prefer to be ignored, is that the bill arrived precisely when economic hardship is sharpening public scrutiny of government performance — when more Filipinos are asking out loud whether the growth numbers match what they have in their wallets.

The bill, if passed, would add another layer to the lawfare blitzkrieg. A state that responds to rising skepticism by expanding its capacity to punish it is not fighting disinformation but managing the problem with the penal code.

Broadly worded speech laws, regardless of stated intent, get used against the people with the least power to fight back in court.

Take the case of Turkey, where the disinformation law was sold as an anti-troll measure. It has been repurposed as a tool for prosecuting reporters. The experience was repeated in Egypt and Singapore.

The honest fix for disinformation is not a statute that lets bureaucrats decide what is true, but rather exposing the cost of lying to the public, not punishing it privately.

HB 9465 will hand the state a tool better suited to silencing the people asking inconvenient questions about why hardship persists.