Fake news: Who will guard the guards?

This week, the Sri Lanka Police announced that it had designated a special Criminal Investigation Department team to act against ‘fake news’ on social media platforms. According to the Police Spokesman, a man who loves the microphone, the special CID team will “patrol cyber space” to gather information about fake news and act under Section 98 of the Police Ordinance, which makes it an offence to create panic by spreading rumours in society. 

From the Government that has been drafting laws to ‘regulate’ social media comes the fresh bombshell that is already having serious consequences on citizens and their lawful exercise of free speech. Arrests of young men were made in Kandy and Colombo this week, at least one of them without a warrant. The police have announced that they do not even need a warrant to arrest people for “sharing or spreading” fake news, a clear overreach by law enforcement. 

In the lead up to the 2019 presidential elections, mainstream media organisations became active purveyors of fake news, as they provided hours of airtime to monks claiming the existence of a supernatural phenomenon foretelling the coming of a great leader. 

As Sri Lanka’s battle with COVID-19 began, these licenced news organisations, provided public airwaves from the state, featured a ‘miracle cure’ for the deadly virus, concocted by a witch doctor in Ratnapura. Tens of thousands of people flocked to the man’s home to purchase the medication that was supposed to ward off the virus. The Speaker of Parliament, the Minister of Health and other politicians became willing participants in a grotesquely unscientific, trial of the now famous ‘Dhammika Paniya’. The Health Minister made herself an international laughing stock when she contracted the coronavirus only weeks after sipping the witch-doctor’s brew.  Months down the line, a clinical trial commissioned by the Ministry of Health no less, found that the tonic was no COVID-19 cure, and abandoned the research. No broadcaster, politician or public figure who touted this potion as a COVID cure has been held accountable. 

Writers like Ahnaf Jazeem, Ramzy Razik and others were arrested by police who did not have the linguistic skill and comprehension to understand the themes and tenor of their work. Razik languished in prison for several months, and the young poet Jazeem has been detained by the CID for over a year, handcuffed to a desk, bitten by rodents and even deprived of pen and paper. 

The Government has now tasked these very police officers with being arbiters in the complex world of disinformation on social media, and they have been given the licence to arrest citizens without so much as a piece of written documentation from a court of law. Brazen overreach even under normal circumstances; intolerable when these police teams will make life and liberty determinations on citizens’ right to free speech and expression. 

Things have reached a clear tipping point, as a government beleaguered by crisis seeks to stem the tide of merciless criticism, mockery, and protest. This is the act of an administration fearful for its future, and desperate to sweep its myriad failures under the carpet. It smacks of an attempt to prevent protest and criticism from reaching a critical mass – a point of no return that will seal its political fate. 

The main Opposition has openly offered legal support to those arrested for violating the Government’s ad hoc regulations about posts on social media. This is a useful first step, but it must be matched with relentless resistance to this clear move by the ruling party to crackdown on the people’s freedom of speech and expression as guaranteed by Sri Lanka’s constitution. It will require countrywide awareness campaigns and relentless challenge of these draconian measures in the highest courts of the land. How opposition parties and the wider public react to the draconian regulation will be a measure of the importance the Opposition and the wider populace attach to the values of free speech and democracy and determine how far the Government will go to stifle legitimate criticism.