Quality journalism to benefit from shelving law against fake news
The government has finally shelved a law against fake news first proposed in 2021 in the wake of social unrest and amid the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic. The decision is welcome. The administration has listened to community concerns about risks to press freedom and free speech, especially from the media industry. A fake news law could have opened a Pandora’s box of complications for these fundamental rights. Around the world, such laws have proved problematic and are mostly used as a tool to control the media.
That is not to say fake news and the social division and mischief it creates have subsided; quite the reverse. But free societies can and must find other ways to deal with them.
Fake news laws are difficult to draft and inevitably restrict press freedom. It is good that the government has recognised this. There are already laws that apply to the more serious forms of disinformation, including a new offence of spreading false information under the Article 23 domestic national security law. There is no need for further restrictions. Misinformation and disinformation also can be dealt with by non-legal means – such as a concerted community effort to educate readers to be more discerning in their consumption of news and opinion.
Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu this week said Hong Kong did not need a fake news law because the media industry had improved and practitioners’ “self-discipline and professionalism” could curb the circulation of falsehoods. “We should go for this as the first option,” Lee said. Secretary for Justice Paul Lam Ting-kwok, revealing earlier that fake news was off the legislative agenda, said “very difficult legal questions” surrounded key definitions of the law.
That said, the fake news phenomenon has only spread and become worse since it played havoc with the World Health Organization’s global anti-pandemic campaign.
The government should lead a community-wide effort to reduce its impact through education in simple, basic steps to filter news you can trust, starting from the age when youngsters become serious consumers of news. It has become known elsewhere as media literacy or information literacy training. In this respect Hong Kong has a lot of work to do.
In the digital age, keeping trust in what we read, see or hear is a challenge to the media industry itself. Professionalism – especially fact-based journalism and resistance to the quest for clicks – is a sound basis for safeguarding press freedom. Shelving a fake news law is not just good politics, but good for the healthy development of the whole media industry and for quality journalism. These are the best defences against the insidious evil of fake news.