On June 3, 2026, the Philippine House of Representatives passed the Digital Media Anti-False Information Act on third and final reading by a lopsided 286-3, with seven abstentions. House Bill 9465, whose principal author is Majority Leader Ferdinand Alexander "Sandro" Marcos, does two very different things at once. One half is a credible, internationally familiar platform-transparency regime. The other half is a criminal speech statute carrying six to 12 years of imprisonment. Bundling them into a single vote is the bill's central flaw.
The defensible half
Start with the strongest case for the law, because it is real. The Philippines is one of the most exposed information environments on earth. DataReportal's Digital 2025 report counts 90.8 million active social media user identities — 78 percent of the population — and 97.5 million internet users at 83.8 percent penetration. Filipinos consistently rank near the top of global rankings for time spent on social platforms. Layered on top of that reach is a documented history of industrial-scale coordinated manipulation, from paid troll networks to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that used the country as a testing ground. A government that asks large platforms to maintain a local legal presence, publish transparency reports, run risk assessments, submit to independent audits, and open data to vetted researchers is not inventing anything radical.
It is, in fact, copying Brussels. The platform obligations on "Very Large Online Platforms" — the term itself, the statements of reasons for removals, the audit requirement, the vetted-researcher access — track the European Union's Digital Services Act almost line for line. That part of the design deserves credit. The DSA's procedural-transparency model is the most defensible regulatory innovation in content governance precisely because it regulates process and accountability, not the truth or falsity of speech. Requiring a platform to explain why it removed a post, and to prove its systems work, expands due process for users. People of Internet has long argued that this kind of structural transparency is the proportionate way to discipline platform power.
The indefensible half
Then comes the criminal code. HB 9465 makes it punishable by six to 12 years in prison and fines of PHP 500,000 to PHP 2 million (roughly US$8,000-32,500) to "publish, disseminate, finance, direct or materially assist in the dissemination of false information" that causes "verifiable public harm" or threatens national security. The drafters added genuine carve-outs — satire, journalism, academic discourse, honest mistakes, and mere liking or resharing are all protected, and the state must prove knowing, material participation. Those safeguards matter and should be acknowledged.
But the operative terms do the damage. Human Rights Watch, in a June 2, 2026 statement, notes that the bill defines actionable harm to include "substantial and measurable economic harm" and "obstruction of critical public services" — categories elastic enough, the group warns, to "muzzle criticism of a wide range of government actions, such as police operations." Lian Buan, HRW's Southeast Asia researcher, said the measure "empowers the authorities to encroach on individual speech as well as the independence of news organizations." A separate foreign-influence clause criminalizes information shared "under the substantial direction or control of a foreign state," which could ensnare ordinary engagement with foreign officials or funders.
The deeper structural problem is who decides. Under the bill, the Department of Information and Communications Technology designates the Very Large Online Platforms and coordinates takedown and account-removal requests with them — without any independent or multistakeholder oversight of that process. An executive-branch agency thereby gains the power to define which platforms matter and to drive removals against them. That is the inverse of the DSA, where takedown disputes route through courts and an independent regulator, not a ministry answerable to the sitting administration.
Why the bundling is the bug
The transparency machinery and the speech crime do not need each other. A platform's obligation to publish a statement of reasons or submit to an audit functions whether or not the underlying speech is criminal. Conversely, the threat of a decade in prison for "false information" chills exactly the contested political speech — accusations against officials, disputed economic claims, criticism of public-service failures — that a healthy democracy must tolerate. Criminal-libel and cyber-libel provisions already in Philippine law, repeatedly flagged by press-freedom monitors as tools of harassment, show how broad speech offenses are used in practice rather than as promised.
The proportionate path is to split the bill. Keep the DSA-style obligations: local legal presence, statements of reasons, transparency reports, risk assessments, audits, researcher access. Move enforcement authority over takedowns from the DICT to a court or a genuinely independent regulator with appeal rights. And drop the custodial penalties for speech entirely; where falsehood causes concrete, provable injury — fraud, incitement, defamation — existing civil and criminal law already reaches it. Coordinated inauthentic behavior, the troll farms and bot networks the bill rightly names, is better addressed through platform-side conduct rules and disclosure than through prosecuting individual posters.
The Senate now takes up the measure. Senators have a chance to salvage the genuinely useful transparency architecture while stripping the parts that turn a platform-accountability law into a censorship instrument. Disinformation is a real harm in a country this online. But a statute that hands an executive ministry control over what large platforms must remove, backed by long prison terms for vaguely defined falsehood, treats the symptom by weakening the open internet it claims to protect.