When Anti-Disinformation Laws Become Tools of Censorship

Key Takeaways

• Anti-disinformation laws often use deliberately vague language that gives governments broad discretion over what counts as "false" or "harmful."
• The same laws used to target journalists in Ethiopia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan are rarely, if ever, applied to state-run propaganda.
• The Committee to Protect Journalists documented 336 journalists imprisoned globally in 2025, many under broadly worded information and speech laws.
• You don't need to prosecute everyone to silence a profession. The threat of prosecution changes what journalists write before any charges are filed.

The word "disinformation" is doing a lot of work in the world right now, and not always the work it’s supposed to do. 

Across a growing number of countries, laws designed to combat the spread of false and harmful information are being applied not to propaganda networks, fabricated news sites, or coordinated bot campaigns, but to journalists, opposition politicians, and anyone who publishes something a government finds inconvenient. The language of protecting the public from lies has, in many cases, become a reliable mechanism for silencing people who tell the truth.

What These Laws Look Like

The template is consistent enough to recognize. A government announces that online disinformation has become a serious threat to public safety or national stability. It introduces legislation that bans the spreading of "false information," "misleading content," or material deemed harmful to national security. 

The language is broad by design. It doesn’t define "false" with any precision, nor does it specify an independent process for determining falsity, and imposes criminal rather than civil penalties, meaning the enforcement mechanism is arrest and prosecution rather than correction and reply.

That vagueness isn’t an oversight. It’s how the law retains its usefulness across a wide range of targets. A provision narrow enough to catch only clear fabrications would miss most of what governments actually want to suppress, which is accurate, independently verified, unflattering reporting. A provision broad enough to catch that will, by definition, cover almost anything a critic, activist, or journalist might write.

Who Ends up Prosecuted

The Council of Europe's framework on freedom of expression in media and digital spaces is grounded in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects expression that offends, shocks, or disturbs, not only expression that comforts. 

That standard exists precisely because governments have always been tempted to define the speech they find most threatening as the speech that most urgently needs suppressing.

When that safeguard is absent, the pattern of who gets prosecuted becomes clear. Ethiopia's Hate Speech and Disinformation Prevention and Suppression Proclamation, passed in 2020, was framed as a response to divisive content online. Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2025 report found that authorities have used it to investigate and detain independent journalists in retaliation for their reporting. 

The same report documented Kyrgyzstan's 2021 Law on Protection from False Information being used to seek the removal of articles in which opposition politicians described being tortured in detention. In Russia, legislation against spreading "false information" about military operations carries sentences of up to 15 years and has been applied against journalists and activists who reported on the war in Ukraine in terms that contradicted the official account.

In none of these cases was the target spreading fabricated content in the sense most people associate with disinformation. The target was reporting.

The Journalist Is the Default Suspect

The Committee to Protect Journalists tracks arrests and imprisonments of press workers globally and documented 336 journalists imprisoned in 2025, many under broadly worded speech and information laws. That figure represents individual people, each of whom produced work that someone in power wanted stopped.

There’s a version of this that operates without a single prosecution. When a journalist knows that publishing a story about police violence, electoral irregularities, or military conduct could result in a criminal charge for spreading false information, the decisions they make about that story change. 

They consider whether their evidence would survive a prosecution. They consider whether their sources could face criminal liability for speaking to them. They consider whether their editor or outlet could be implicated. All of that calculation happens before the story is written, before any charge is filed, and before any government official has to say a word.

That’s the chilling effect, and it is not a side effect of these laws. It is frequently their primary function.

The Misinformation These Laws Ignore

There’s another way to understand selective enforcement: look at what does not get prosecuted. State media in countries with aggressive anti-disinformation laws consistently publish content that would meet almost any independent definition of misleading or false. 

Coordinated government campaigns to shape public perception of elections, protests, or military operations proceed without legal consequences. The platforms that amplify government-approved narratives are not subject to the scrutiny that independent outlets face.

This is what separates a genuine commitment to accurate public information from a legal tool dressed in its language. A law that criminalizes criticism of the government while leaving government-adjacent misinformation untouched is not an anti-disinformation law. It’s a censorship mechanism with better marketing.

I’m arguing that disinformation isn’t a real problem. It is, and it causes genuine harm to public discourse and to the people targeted by fabricated stories. But the solution can’t be a law that gives governments unlimited discretion over what counts as true. That’s not a correction. It’s a replacement of one information problem with a more serious one: the problem of governments deciding, with the force of criminal law, what the public is allowed to know.