MANILA — A bill that would criminalise knowingly creating, financing, directing or materially assisting false information online has cleared the Philippine House of Representatives and is now before the Senate, but artificial intelligence experts, journalists and civil society groups are warning that the measure risks suppressing free speech rather than protecting democratic discourse. House Bill No. 9465, titled the Digital Media Anti-False Information Act, was passed in June by a near-unanimous vote of 286 to three. Its principal author is House Majority Leader Sandro Marcos, the eldest son of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who specifically asked Congress in February to prioritise legislation against disinformation. Under the bill, anyone convicted of knowingly creating, financing, directing or materially assisting false information intended to cause “verifiable public harm” or a “serious threat to national security” would face six to twelve years in prison and fines of up to two million pesos, equivalent to around US$32,575. The measure also covers undisclosed AI-generated images, video and audio, making it one of the first Philippine legislative attempts to address the rising threat of synthetic media in politics, public health and national security. Lawmakers justified the urgency of the bill by pointing to coordinated troll farms and bot networks, election-related misinformation, health falsehoods, AI-generated deceptive content and the potential for foreign influence operations to destabilise the country’s democratic institutions.
Despite these stated objectives, critics argue that the bill is fundamentally flawed because it targets the content of individual posts rather than the behaviour and systems that allow disinformation to flourish at scale. Carl Javier, executive director and chief AI ethicist at Data and AI Ethics PH, a nonprofit organisation advocating for responsible, human-centered use of artificial intelligence, said the legislation risks creating a “chilling effect” and enabling “prior restraint” — a legal concept referring to government action that blocks speech before it is published or broadcast. Javier told Eco-Business that the current bill looks at content, and that this approach could impinge on freedom of expression. He said a more effective regulatory framework should instead focus on the behaviour of platforms, shifting accountability toward companies that permit content to circulate despite violating their own community standards, or whose engagement-driven algorithms amplify misleading material because it performs well. Such an approach, he argued, would also direct scrutiny at coordinated disinformation operators — the organised networks that design, finance and manipulate information operations to spread false narratives — rather than primarily criminalising ordinary users who post or share content. By concentrating on individual speech acts, the bill misses the structural drivers of information disorder and risks punishing the symptoms while leaving the underlying mechanisms untouched.
Journalists’ groups have been even more direct in their opposition, warning that the measure could become a legal weapon against press freedom and political dissent. Macel Ingles, chairperson of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, a longstanding advocate for media rights, said giving the state the power to determine what is true and what is false is authoritarian. In an interview with Eco-Business, Ingles argued that this power to act as the arbiter of truth or falsehood can be used by those in power to muzzle critical reporting and silence dissent. She said the bill violates the constitutional rights to free press and free expression, and she cited recent history to justify her concern. During the administration of former president Rodrigo Duterte, the Bayanihan to Heal As One Act — an emergency law enacted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic that included a provision penalising purportedly false coronavirus information — was invoked against journalists, artists and ordinary citizens who were critical of the government’s pandemic response, according to media groups. Ingles said those fears are not unfounded and that the earlier law was weaponised to go after government critics by accusing them of peddling fake news. The comparison is especially sensitive in the Philippines because President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was a major beneficiary of coordinated online historical revisionism and disinformation before his 2022 election victory, a fact that civil society groups say makes the current bill a particular threat to democratic accountability.
Both Ingles and Javier urged lawmakers to set aside the anti-disinformation bill and instead prioritise more comprehensive legislation that addresses the underlying conditions that enable disinformation, while strengthening existing legal protections. Ingles noted that HB 9465 moved ahead of House Bill No. 10362, also known as the AI Governance Act, which was filed by party-list representative Chel Diokno and fellow lawmakers about two months later. She said the proposed AI law offers a broader framework for governing AI-related harms and the digital systems that fuel information disorder. While the disinformation bill does not only cover AI-generated content, Ingles argued, a comprehensive law on the governance of AI is necessary to address the structural drivers of information disorder. She said that without the AI governance law, responsibility rests on the sources of information rather than on the digital infrastructure that allows opaque algorithms, unregulated influence operations and platform structures to make disinformation flourish in the first place. The AI Governance Act, as described by its proponents, proposes safeguards on transparency, privacy, discrimination, labour impacts and the environmental footprint of AI systems and facilities. Ingles said that measure should be treated as an urgent priority, alongside the long-pending Right to Information Act, which would operationalise Filipinos’ constitutional right to access information on matters of public concern and establish a legal framework for obtaining government records.
Javier agreed that lawmakers need to address regulatory gaps, but he cautioned against treating the anti-disinformation bill and the AI Governance Act as mutually exclusive choices. In his view, the Philippines needs a patchwork of legislation that reinforces current protections, creates space for what should be advanced, and establishes the necessary safeguards for emerging technologies. He said the government should pursue targeted new laws while also strengthening existing ones, including the Data Privacy Act of 2012, which regulates how government agencies and private organisations process personal data. Strengthening data privacy, he argued, is directly relevant to disinformation because the manipulation of personal information and the micro-targeting of users based on their digital footprints are core tools of influence operations. Similarly, Ingles said the NUJP and other media advocates consider several pending measures more urgent than the anti-online disinformation bill, including the Right to Information Act. That measure would give practical effect to the constitutionally recognised right of the people to know about matters of public concern and would create a clear legal pathway for citizens and journalists to access government records. Without such a law, she suggested, ordinary citizens and the press are left dependent on official goodwill, while a disinformation law could easily be used to penalise those who question official narratives rather than to protect the public from genuine manipulation.
The bill’s path now moves to the Senate, where its fate is uncertain. Lawmakers supportive of the measure argue that the digital ecosystem has become so polluted by coordinated falsehoods, foreign interference and synthetic media that the state must take firmer action to protect the integrity of public discourse and national security. But the mounting opposition from academic experts, AI ethicists and the country’s largest journalists’ organisation reflects a broader anxiety about the legislation’s potential for abuse, particularly in a political environment where disinformation and historical revisionism already played a decisive role in the last presidential election. Critics are not disputing that disinformation is a serious problem; rather, they are warning that a law that grants authorities broad discretion to decide what counts as false and harmful online could be far more damaging than the disease it purports to cure. They point to the absence of independent safeguards, the blurred definition of “verifiable public harm,” and the law’s focus on individual expression instead of platform accountability as fatal flaws. The danger, as Javier and Ingles describe it, is a legal regime that criminalises citizens for sharing information while leaving untouched the algorithms, platforms, political operatives and financial incentives that make disinformation profitable and politically effective. As the Senate prepares to deliberate, the key question is whether the Philippines will adopt a punitive approach to online speech or a more structural, rights-respecting framework that can genuinely address the technological and systemic roots of the disinformation crisis without silencing the voices a democracy needs to hear.
