MALABON City Rep. Josephine Veronique “Jaye” Noel and her husband Rep. Florencio “Bem” Noel (PL, An Waray) yesterday filed a bill seeking to criminalize the acts of creating and spreading fake news and disinformation.
House Bill No. 2971 seeks to amend Republic Act No. 10175, otherwise known as “Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012,” by criminalizing fake news as a cybercrime and providing penalties.
“It cannot be stressed enough that nowadays, people have been repeatedly misinformed about what they consider to be data and facts through the advent of ‘fake news,’” the bill said.
The bill defined fake news as “misinformation and disinformation of stories, facts and news which is presented as a fact, the veracity of which cannot be confirmed, with the purpose of distorting the truth and misleading its audience.”
The authors said that “not even credible sources like media outlets and broadcast stations were spared from the false information spread out by paid trolls to distort truth and deliberately mislead people to think the opposite of what is actually happening.”
“Both misinformation and disinformation must not go unpunished, especially since it poisons the minds of our citizens by distorting the truth,” the Noel couple said in the bill.
Last June, former vice president Leni Robredo started waging a war against peddlers of fake news and disinformation in the country by filing criminal complaints against them.
Through the help of a group of volunteer lawyers, Robredo’s camp began studying the possibility of filing the complaints against those who spread and continue to spread lies against the opposition leader who lost to President Marcos Jr. in the recently concluded presidential race.
