When Pakistan's President signed the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act, 2025 into law in late January 2025, the government framed it as a measured response to online disinformation. Sixteen months on, the law's real-world footprint — challenged in the Islamabad High Court by the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ), Bolo Bhi, Bytes for All and other petitioners, and accompanied by a steady drip of arrests through 2026 — is a useful natural experiment for Indian policymakers still debating how far the state should go in policing online speech.
For an Indian audience, the PECA amendment is less interesting as foreign news than as a warning label. The structural choices Islamabad made — criminalising a vaguely defined category of "false or fake" information, creating a powerful new regulator with takedown authority, and stacking penalties high enough to chill ordinary users — mirror proposals that have been floated, and in some cases trialled, on this side of the border.
What the PECA Amendment Actually Does
The 2025 amendment makes three consequential changes to Pakistan's 2016 cybercrime statute. First, it inserts a new offence for the intentional dissemination of information the publisher "knows or has reason to believe" is false and likely to cause "fear, panic, disorder or unrest," punishable by up to three years' imprisonment and fines of PKR 2 million (roughly USD 7,000). Second, it establishes the Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority (SMPRA), an executive body empowered to order platforms to remove content and block accounts. Third, it creates dedicated tribunals to hear cases under the Act on an expedited basis.
The drafting is the problem. "False information" is not a self-defining category; in any politically polarised environment — and Pakistan is hardly unique here — it tends to collapse into "information the government does not like." The PFUJ, in its petition before the Islamabad High Court, argues that the amendment is incompatible with Article 19 of Pakistan's Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression. Reports from the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders document arrests of journalists, YouTubers and ordinary social media users under the amended provisions through 2025 and into 2026.
Why the Indian Reader Should Care
India has been here before, in milder form. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 — and the 2023 amendment that sought to empower a government Fact Check Unit (FCU) to flag online content about "the business of the Central Government" as false — represented a softer version of the same regulatory instinct. In September 2024, the Bombay High Court struck down the FCU amendment as unconstitutional in Kunal Kamra v. Union of India, finding it disproportionate and a violation of Article 19(1)(a). The court's reasoning — that giving the executive a monopoly on what counts as "truth" online is incompatible with free speech — is precisely the diagnosis the PFUJ is now asking the Islamabad High Court to reach.
India's regulatory direction since then has been notably more restrained. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 focuses on data rather than speech. The forthcoming Digital India Act, by repeated official accounts, is expected to move away from criminalising content categories and toward platform-design obligations. That is the right instinct. Pakistan's experience is a reminder of what happens when a state does the opposite.
Three Lessons from Islamabad's Misstep
1. Vague speech offences scale badly.
A criminal statute that turns on a regulator's view of what is "false" or likely to cause "unrest" is, by construction, an instrument of selective enforcement. The chilling effect lands hardest on small publishers, freelance journalists and ordinary users who cannot absorb the cost of even a frivolous prosecution.
2. Executive takedown authorities concentrate risk.
Pakistan's SMPRA, like India's earlier FCU proposal, places adjudicative power inside the executive branch. Even well-intentioned versions of this design suffer from the same defect: the regulated party (online speech about government) and the regulator (the government) are the same actor. Independent judicial review, narrow categories, and ex-post rather than ex-ante intervention are the structural fixes.
3. Disinformation is a real problem, but criminal law is a poor tool.
Nothing in the case against PECA's drafting requires denying that disinformation harms democracies. The pro-innovation answer is to invest in transparency obligations on large platforms — disclosure of recommender systems, researcher access, friction on virality — rather than criminalising users. The EU's Digital Services Act and India's emerging conversation around "systemic risk" obligations both point in this direction.
What to Watch
The Islamabad High Court's eventual ruling on the PECA challenge will be the single most important data point. A judgment that follows the Bombay High Court's reasoning in Kunal Kamra would help establish a regional norm against criminalising vaguely defined "fake news." A judgment that upholds the amendment would embolden similar proposals elsewhere in South Asia.
For Indian policymakers, the prudent stance is the one already implied by the Bombay High Court and the government's own evolving thinking: treat disinformation as a platform-design and media-literacy problem, not a criminal-law problem. Pakistan is currently running the alternative experiment in public. The results, so far, are not encouraging.