The Philippines Wants to Criminalize Disinformation and Zimbabwe Should Pay Attention

On June 3, the Philippine House of Representatives passed the Digital Media Anti-False Information Act bill by an overwhelming 286-3 vote, with seven abstentions. The bill would criminalise knowingly publishing or spreading false information with the intent to cause “verifiable public harm” or a “serious threat to national security.”

Conviction could mean six to 12 years in prison and a fine of up to 2 million pesos, roughly US$35,000.

The principal author is Sandro Marcos, the House Majority Leader and eldest son of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The administration has made the legislation a top priority.

That family connection is difficult to ignore.

The Philippines has spent years dealing with the political consequences of disinformation. During the 2022 presidential election, the academic fact-checking coalition Tsek.ph and Vera Files independently concluded that Marcos Jr. was the largest beneficiary of election-related disinformation, while his principal opponent, Leni Robredo, was its biggest target.

Tsek.ph’s tracking found Marcos was the leading beneficiary of misleading online content during the campaign.

Researchers including Jonathan Corpus Ong have documented a much longer campaign to rehabilitate the Marcos family name after the 1986 uprising that removed Ferdinand Marcos Sr. from power. The former dictator’s government jailed, tortured and killed thousands, while Philippine courts later found that the family had accumulated billions through ill-gotten wealth.

This history matters because political memory is rarely a neutral thing online.

In the year before the 2022 election, pro-Marcos Facebook pages generated nearly 75 million interactions, compared with just over 39 million for Robredo, according to CrowdTangle data. Researchers linked that advantage to years of organised narrative-building.

Marcos Jr. has denied personally directing a troll operation. He has described himself as a victim of fake news and accused fact-checkers of pursuing an agenda and inventing quotations.

Now his administration is backing a law that would give the state greater power to determine which information is false and which false information has crossed the line into criminal conduct.

This is where the Philippine debate becomes particularly relevant to Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe has its own history of laws dealing with false statements and information considered prejudicial to the state. Section 31 of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act [Cap 9:23] addresses publishing or communicating false statements prejudicial to the State and carries severe penalties in circumstances covered by the provision.

The Cyber and Data Protection Act of 2021 also created offences around the intentional transmission of false data messages through computer or information systems where the required intent to cause psychological or economic harm is established.

The legal systems are different. The political histories are different. The point is the principle.

Once the state is given broad authority to determine which statements are sufficiently false, harmful or threatening to warrant punishment, the definition of unacceptable speech can become a political question.

Zimbabwean civil society and media organisations, including MISA Zimbabwe, have repeatedly raised concerns about broadly framed laws of this kind and their potential effect on journalism, activism and digital speech.

That is precisely the danger now being debated in the Philippines.

The problem is in the wording.

The Philippine bill does not simply prohibit lying. It attaches criminal punishment to information deemed to cause “verifiable public harm” or pose a “serious threat to national security.”

Who decides?

What qualifies as verifiable public harm? How serious must the threat be? Who determines whether a statement is false before a court reaches the question of guilt?

Those questions matter because governments are political actors. They have interests, enemies, reputations to protect and narratives they would prefer the public to accept.

The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, through IFEX, has pointed to the irony of the legislation. The Council for People’s Development and Governance has described it as a potential road to censorship and impunity.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines has documented 10 journalists and media workers killed and 242 alleged press freedom violations since Marcos Jr. took office.

That does not prove that every prosecution under the proposed law would be politically motivated. It does demonstrate why journalists are nervous about handing the government a powerful new instrument over information.

AlterMidya has warned that allowing the state to define false information could open the door to broader censorship. Democracy.net.ph has also raised concerns about provisions treating media personalities as an aggravating factor.

There is another reason to be cautious.

The Philippines already has expansive laws dealing with national security and terrorism. Civil society groups have argued that measures such as the Anti-Terrorism Act and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act have been used selectively against critics and activists.

A new law criminalising disinformation would therefore not exist in a vacuum. It would become another instrument in an already complicated legal environment governing political speech.

Sandro Marcos insists the legislation is aimed at intentional deception rather than criticism, debate or legitimate journalism. The House has also said the bill can be refined to strengthen protections for journalists.

That distinction is important. Democracies have a legitimate interest in stopping deliberate campaigns designed to cause real harm. Disinformation can damage elections, public health, markets and social stability.

But there is a difference between regulating the machinery that spreads falsehoods and criminalising speech according to a definition ultimately enforced by the state.

The National Union of People’s Lawyers has argued for precisely that distinction. A serious response to disinformation should examine political advertising, algorithmic amplification, commercial monetisation and foreign influence rather than simply criminalising speech after the government decides that the speech is false and harmful.

That approach attacks the infrastructure of manipulation rather than giving politicians another weapon in the argument over who gets to define reality.

For Zimbabwe, that distinction should sound familiar.

The question is never simply whether disinformation is bad. Of course it is. The harder question is who gets to decide what is disinformation, what constitutes harm, and what happens to the person who gets that judgment wrong.

Those powers look very different when held by a government you trust and when held by one you do not.

The Marcos family understands the political power of information better than most. Its history is inseparable from the struggle over how Filipinos remember the dictatorship, the 1986 uprising and the family’s return to political power.

That makes the current proposal unusually uncomfortable.

A government whose political dynasty benefited from years of narrative reconstruction is now asking for greater legal authority over false narratives.

Perhaps the Philippine government genuinely wants to protect the public from disinformation. Perhaps some version of the bill could eventually be written with sufficient safeguards.

But laws governing speech should be judged by what they allow governments to do when the government itself becomes the subject of the speech.

That is the part Zimbabwe should pay attention to.

Because once the state acquires the authority to decide which political narratives are false, the argument is no longer merely about disinformation.

It is about who gets to police the boundary between a lie, a mistake, an inconvenient fact and a political opinion.

And governments have never been particularly good at drawing that boundary when they are standing on one side of it.