The Economist February 13th 2021 57
InternationalFreedom of speechInconvenient truths
D
uring hisfinal days Mohamed Monir,
an Egyptian journalist, was so short of
breath he could barely speak. In a video re-
corded in July last year, as his final hours
approached, he begged for oxygen. He died
in a hospital isolation unit after contract-
ing covid-19 in prison while awaiting trial.
He had been arrested the previous month
after, among other things, writing an arti-
cle lambasting the Egyptian government’s
response to the pandemic. He was charged
with spreading false news, misusing social
media and joining a terrorist group.
Covid-19 has indeed unleashed a flood
of misinformation. But it has also given
governments such as Egypt’s an excuse to
crack down on their critics using the pre-
text of restricting the spread of fake news.
Between March and October last year 17
countries passed new laws against “online
misinformation” or “fake information”, ac-
cording to the International Press Institute
(see map on next page). Among those lead-
ing this charge are such guardians of free
speech as Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and
Rodrigo Duterte. Other authoritarians,
such as Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, havefollowed since then. Hong Kong’s chief ex-
ecutive, Carrie Lam, is keen to pass a law to
stop the dissemination of fake news after
the protests that roiled the city in 2019.
Governments have always regulated
speech. And the spread of disinformation
is indeed a serious and growing problem. If
politicians are enacting laws against fake
news to catch people spreading deliberate
lies, “that’s one thing”, argues Marko Mila-
novic, an expert in international law at the
University of Nottingham. If, however,
they are putting in place broad, vague mea-
sures that are in fact intended to curb the
freedom of the press and free speech more
widely, “that’s a huge problem.”
Some governments have cited the pan-
demic as justification for new laws. Under
legislation introduced in March 2020 in
Russia, media outlets found guilty of de-
liberately spreading false information
about matters of public safety, including
covid-19, face fines of up to €117,000
($140,000). Russia already imposed fines
on people for spreading “false informa-
tion” but the new regulations fall under the
criminal code which means the puni-shments can also include time in jail. The
editor of one website was fined 60,000
roubles ($810) for reporting that 1,000
graves had been dug for potential victims
of covid-19. Tatyana Voltskaya, a freelance
journalist, was fined 30,000 roubles in De-
cember for a radio report that included an
interview with an anonymous health
worker, who described the shortage of ven-
tilators in Russian hospitals and other dif-
ficulties faced by doctors battling covid-19.
Other governments are reviving obso-
lete legislation, ostensibly to combat fake
news related to covid-19. Their true aims,
however, are to hamper independent jour-
nalism or “retaliate against those doing re-
porting that they don’t appreciate”, says
Courtney Radsch of the Committee to Pro-
tect Journalists, a New York-based ngo. In
March the Jordanian government used a
“defence” law from 1992 that permits the
declaration of a state of emergency in ex-
ceptional circumstances to do so as part of
its efforts to stem the spread of covid-19.
The law allows the government to monitor
the content of newspapers and censor or
shut down any outlet without giving any
reason. On Christmas Eve Jamal Haddad,
the Jordanian publisher of a news website,
was detained after publishing an article
asking why officials had received vaccina-
tions against covid-19 when these were not
yet available to ordinary citizens.
And some authorities are invoking laws
that may not even exist. Hopewell Chin’o-
no, a journalist in Zimbabwe, was arrested
in January for tweeting about police vio-Governments keen to muzzle journalists are abusing laws against “fake news”