Bangladesh spent the past year doing something most governments never do: dismantling its own most-abused censorship law. The interim government scrapped the Cyber Security Act, 2023, dropped the prosecutions inherited from its predecessor, and was rightly credited for it. But a draft telecom ordinance now moving through the regulator threatens to rebuild — through administrative rules and criminal penalties — much of the discretionary power that reform just took away.
A real repeal, not a cosmetic one
Start with what went right, because it was substantial. On 21 May 2025 Bangladesh gazetted the Cyber Security Ordinance, 2025 (Ordinance No. 25 of 2025), per the official Bangladesh Government Press gazette, repealing the Cyber Security Act, 2023 — itself a lightly rebranded Digital Security Act (DSA) of 2018. Nine of the most contentious sections were dropped, and because roughly 95% of harassment cases had been filed under those clauses, the vast majority of pending prosecutions were automatically dismissed.
That mattered because the old law was an instrument of mass prosecution, not narrow cybercrime enforcement. The Centre for Governance Studies counted more than 7,000 DSA cases filed by early 2023, with at least 451 journalists sued. Removing those cases was no cosmetic gesture. Freedom House nudged Bangladesh's internet-freedom score up to 45 out of 100 in Freedom on the Net 2025, from 40 a year earlier, calling the new ordinance more transparent and more appealable than its predecessor. On the headline question — should a state weaponise a 'digital security' statute against critics — Bangladesh moved decisively in the right direction.
The strongest case for acting on platforms
The instinct now driving the regulator deserves a fair hearing. Large platforms genuinely host real harms — coordinated incitement, fraud, non-consensual imagery, and child sexual abuse material — that move faster than courts. In March 2026 Amnesty International warned that Meta's content-moderation delays risked fuelling real-world violence in Bangladesh, and the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has complained that the time platforms take to act on incendiary posts 'is creating an opportunity for further incitement.' Meta operates no local office in the country despite enormous reach. A government that has just expanded speech rights can reasonably argue the cure for past over-criminalisation is better rules — clear civil duties on the largest companies — not zero rules. That is a defensible goal.
But the new draft revives the old machine
The problem is design, not ambition. The BTRC has drafted a Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulation (Amendment) Ordinance inserting a new section 66-ka into the Telecommunication Act, 2001. As The Daily Star reported, on written instruction from the government the BTRC could order any telecom provider, intermediary, or social-media platform to block or remove content 'without providing any explanation,' with compliance required within 72 hours. Failure becomes a criminal offence carrying up to five years' imprisonment, a fine of up to Tk 300 crore (about US$25 million), or both.
The triggering categories are sweeping: content deemed 'anti-national,' seditious, or 'capable of inciting hatred, division, unrest, or fear.' A parallel draft bringing social-media intermediaries under BTRC oversight would require round-the-clock local liaison teams and resident compliance officers. A coalition of 45 organisations led by Access Now has urged the BTRC to withdraw the draft, warning it would obstruct encryption and endanger journalists and activists; the EFF separately criticised the rushed online-speech 'solution' in December 2025.
Why this recreates the DSA problem
This is the same architecture that produced over-prosecution before: broad executive discretion, plus vague harm categories, plus criminal liability. When a regulator can order takedowns on elastic 'anti-state' grounds and platforms face crore-scale fines and prison for non-compliance, the rational corporate response is to remove first and ask questions never. The chilling effect lands hardest on the journalism and political speech the repeal was meant to protect. Routing speech governance through the telecom regulator rather than the courts reintroduces the core defect the gazette of May 2025 had begun to fix.
A proportionate path is available
Bangladesh can pursue genuine harms without rebuilding the machine:
- Civil, not criminal. Drop prison terms for platform non-compliance; use proportionate administrative penalties scaled to revenue, not flat crore-level fines.
- A judge in the loop. Require prior judicial authorisation, or fast appealable review, for any blocking order — no removals 'without explanation.'
- Narrow the harms. Replace 'anti-national' and 'inciting division' with precise, conduct-based categories meeting the legality and proportionality test.
- Tier and disclose. Apply substantive duties only above a meaningful user threshold, and mandate published takedown-request data — the single most effective check on abuse.
Meta's slow response to incitement is a real problem, but the fix is statutory response deadlines for clearly defined illegal content, not open-ended sedition powers. Bangladesh got the hard part right by repealing a decade-old speech law. The test of a reform government is not what it repeals — it is what it refuses to recreate.