MANILA – A legislative Bill that its authors say will curb online disinformation while protecting the press has cleared the Philippines’ House of Representatives and is now before the Senate. But the journalists and researchers who have spent years documenting disinformation are asking lawmakers to toss the measure.

House Bill No. 9465, the Digital Media Anti-False Information Act, was passed in June by 286 votes to three. Its lead author is House Majority Leader Sandro Marcos, the eldest son of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who in February asked Congress to prioritise a Bill against disinformation as long as it was “balanced”.

Under the Bill, anyone convicted of knowingly creating, financing, directing or materially assisting false information intended to cause verifiable public harm or a serious threat to national security faces six to 12 years in prison and fines of up to two million pesos ($32,800). Undisclosed artificial intelligence-generated images, videos and audio are also covered.

Several other Bills on the same issue have been filed in the Senate, but they remain in limbo. The committee on public information and mass media has yet to start discussing these Bills, having no new chairman following a leadership shake-up in the 24-member Senate in June.

That delay has given the Bill’s opponents an opportunity.

A coalition of civil society groups issued a joint position paper criticising the Bill on July 25, while a separate statement led by the Movement for Media Safety Philippines has drawn signatures from 67 newsrooms and more than 80 journalists.

What they dispute is not the problem, but lawmakers’ proposed remedy: a law that would make the state the arbiter of what is false. This is an issue in a country where fact-checkers have found that coordinated disinformation networks helped put the Marcos administration into office, and where the tools already on...