IMAGINE you share a Facebook post about flooding in your village, warning neighbors to avoid a certain road. It turns out the road was passable after all. Could you go to jail for that?
House Bill 9465, or the proposed “Digital Media Anti-False Information Act,” wants to punish people who spread false information online. On paper, this sounds reasonable. We have all seen the damage fake news can do: panic during a calamity, doctored photos during an election, scams that prey on the gullible.
But read the bill closely, and a different picture appears. This is not simply a crime bill. At its core, it regulates the content of what we say, and spreads the power to judge that content across several hands, not just one.
First, the platforms themselves — Facebook, X, TikTok and the like — become the first judges. The bill requires platforms to act on content they decide is false or harmful, and explain that decision in a “statement of reasons.” Before any official or judge ever sees the post, the platform has already decided whether it stays up, gets a warning label, or disappears.
Second, “fact-checking organizations” enter the picture. The bill says platforms must work with groups accredited either by an international body or by “recognized Philippine media organizations.” But the bill never says who decides which Philippine organizations are “recognized” — a serious gap. Whoever controls that accreditation effectively controls whose version of the truth gets stamped official.
Third, there is the Department of Information and Communications Technology, or DICT. The bill does not make the DICT the judge of any single post. But the department accredits the dispute-settlement bodies, accredits the researchers who study platform data, and decides which platforms face the heaviest rules. The DICT also has a liaison officer who may “coordinate” with platforms on “takedown or moderation requests” tied to disinformation that threatens “national security or public order.” That coordination can happen quietly, with no public record, long before anyone files a case in court.
Fourth, only at the end of this chain do we reach a judge. The bill correctly gives our courts, and not any government office, the final say on whether someone is guilty of the crime it creates. This is one of the bill’s genuine strengths. Unlike some other countries, where a single government minister can declare something false and order it taken down, this bill insists that a conviction requires a real trial.
But here is the catch. By the time a case reaches a judge, the damage may have already been done. A post can be removed, a page can be demonetized, a reputation can be ruined, all before any court rules on anything. The judge arrives last, after the harm to free expression has already happened.
Content regulation
This is why HB 9465 is, at bottom, content regulation. It does not simply ask platforms to behave responsibly. It asks someone, a platform, a fact-checker, a government office, to read what you wrote and decide whether it is true, false, harmful, or dangerous to the nation. That is a far heavier kind of power than requiring a company to publish its prices or protect children’s data.
The citizen election-watch community knows this terrain well. For decades, the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections, or Namfrel, has fought to keep our elections honest by relying on citizens, not the government, to verify what truly happened at the precinct level. We learned the hard way that whoever controls the verification of truth controls the outcome. A law meant to fight disinformation must not end up creating new, unaccountable arbiters of truth, whether they sit in a tech company’s compliance office or inside a government department.
What should be done? First, do away with the accreditation of fact-checkers altogether. Accreditation, no matter who runs it, means someone has control over who gets to speak for the truth. Fact-checkers do not need a new code because one already exists. The International Fact-Checking Network, run by the Poynter Institute, has a code of principles that commits signatories to nonpartisanship, transparency about sources, funding, and methods, and an honest policy of correcting their own errors. Two Philippine organizations, Rappler and VERA Files, have lived by this code since 2017. HB 9465 does not need to invent a new accreditor, government or otherwise. It only needs to step back and let these established, peer-reviewed codes do the job, the same way our journalists already hold themselves to a code of ethics through their own professional groups. We have already seen what happens when government gets involved: officials once branded Rappler and VERA Files as biased, precisely because their findings were unflattering to the administration in power. That is the danger of accreditation, however well-intended, and it is exactly what an independent, peer-reviewed code is meant to prevent. Second, any DICT-platform coordination on content should be in writing, with reasons stated, and logged for public review, not arranged quietly through a liaison officer. Third, lawmakers must tighten the bill’s definition of “foreign-directed disinformation,” so it cannot be turned against ordinary civic groups, journalists, or election watchdogs simply for receiving international training or grants, which is normal practice worldwide.
None of this means we should abandon the fight against disinformation. Fake news is real and it hurts real people. But the cure must not be worse than the disease. A vague law, enforced by too many unaccountable hands, can do as much damage to our democracy as the disinformation it seeks to punish.
In a free society, the safest place to decide what is true is still a court of law, applying clear rules, in the open, with both sides heard. Let us insist that Congress get this right.
