Laws vs fake news can be ‘tool to silence free press’ – veteran journo

Peter Greste speaks at the Democracy and Disinformation Conference at the Ateneo Professional Schools, Rockwell Center, Makati City on February 12.

Legislation that attempt to criminalize the spread of “fake news” and disinformation may be used to curtail press freedom and free speech, a veteran journalist said on Monday.

At the Democracy and Disinformation conference in Manila, Peter Greste, a former TV journalist for the BBC and Al-Jazeera, said that such laws could become a tool for authorities to crackdown on journalism and dissent.

“When you criminalize these kinds of transgressions, you give a lot of power to the authorities to you use that as a tool to silence free press,” Greste noted.

Greste, who is also a professor of journalism and communication at the University of Queensland, was responding to a query about the potential dangers of passing legislation against fake news and disinformation.

“It becomes anything that challenges the integrity of the state, anything that undermines confidence in the state institutions can be interpreted as political opposition,” he said.

He added: “I have real problems with legislative solution.”

He shared his experience in Egypt where the government passed legislation that was designed to protect national security by preventing the spread of false information and ideology on the surface but had serious repercussions on press freedom.

The Egyptian government, he said, loosely interpreted the laws to silence and arrest the members of the press who report on opposition.

Greste spent 400 days in an Egyptian jail as a result of his work as a journalist.

“If the law can be loosely interpreted, at some point it will be loosely interpreted. There will be a retreat of freedom of speech and a free press,” he said.               /kga

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