1) The Final Recommendation:
I, as a Policy analyst, recommend to oppose the current draft of Karnataka Misinformation and Fake News (Prohibition) Bill 2025 by Karnataka Government.While the government’s intent to combat misinformation is laudable, this bill ironically becomes a threat to democracy rather than its safeguard. It undermines constitutional freedoms, lacks checks and balances, and risks becoming a tool of censorship rather than a protector of truth.
CORE DEFECTS:
– Violates Article 19(1)(a) Through vague and broad definitions that fail supreme court’s three-pronged test: narrow tailoring, connection to harm, and judicial oversight
– Creates administrative and federal conflicts resulting in over-censorship
– Lacks judicial oversight or proportionality safeguards as per Supreme Court standards
2) THE CRISIS: Constitutional Catastrophe
This bill is a direct attack on Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution. Government officers are conferred unparalleled authority to decide truth and falsehood with minimal judicial supervision. Historical precedent has warned us: Section 66A of the IT Act, invalidated by The Supreme Court in ‘Shreya Singhal v. Union of India’ for similar constitutional flaws.
The law breaks every rule the Supreme Court has set for speech limits:
– Definitions need to be narrow and exact,
– Enforcement needs to involve judicial review, and
– Punishment needs to be proportional
Thus, the bill fails on all counts creating risk of criminal prosecution before meaningful hearings, allowing content to be removed in hours by any administrative order. Even the Appeal procedures do not have specific timeframes or meaningful review procedures to follow. This represents the administrative tyrannic rule disguised as law enforcement.
3) Evidence and Supporting Arguments (Justifications for Opposition)
- THE CAUSE OF CHAOS: Definitional Disaster
The question is, what is the truth? The bill vaguely addresses the critical issue. Information exists contextually (past, present, future), it evolves, and much of it is also very technical and requires expert-level knowledge. The bill is more based on a presumption that staff in the public service have expertise on all matters of public life domains.
The bill defines “misinformation” and “fake news” so broadly that it could criminalise any speech in a variety of contexts. For example, In initial reporting of the Balasore train tragedy, where casualty figures and causes were later corrected, could be prosecutable under this bill. Surely, if a citizen questioned official statistics and used misleading data (i.e., disputed statistics) they simply found on the internet, they could end up in front of the criminal judges panel.
- THE EXECUTION FLAW: Enforcement Nightmare
Karnataka’s administrative body is ill-equipped with both the technical infrastructure and human resources for large scale content moderation. The number of pieces of digital content that would need to be evaluated would overwhelm any such system and risk arbitrary action or complete failure of the mechanism. In the Germany NetzDG case experience, the Law required social media to delete illegal content quickly or risk hefty fines. Since the rules are unclear, platforms frequently take down even legal posts to avoid problems. This results in excessive censorship and restricts free speech.
- THE SYSTEMIC RIFT: Federalism Fracture
Think about it. Online communications do not stop at the state border or even national borders, so which law will apply when a tweet is posted from Delhi but consumed within Bengaluru? What happens if the different states have different approaches regarding how they will treat tweets? How are platforms supposed to responsibly navigate this landscape without violating one law over the other? This legislation confounds an already dynamic landscape and adds further legal ambiguity in the very complex system.
Digital communications are already governed by Federal legislation, like the IT Act, 2000, in India. By introducing laws relating to digital communications that pertain to locations and territories, the new legislation from Karnataka adds another layer of complexity, as it will not coincide with the existing laws at the national level. Still, it will also not necessarily coincide with what policies emerge in other states in this regard. The question remains, who is supposed to keep track of all this?
- ‘THE GLOBAL LESSONS’: International Warning
Worldwide experiences in enacting misinformation legislation provide clear warnings to countries. Like Singapore’s POFMA was criticised for curbing legitimate political discourse. In Thailand, the broadening of the Computer Crime Act beyond its original scope effectively silenced critics of the government. Broad misinformation laws are particularly troubling in even democratic countries, where they have become laws of censorship.
- ‘THE FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING’: Democracy Misread
The bill’s binary true-false, allowed or controlled understanding is woefully incapable of handling the complexity of information. During COVID-19, health authorities updated their official guidance at least 18 times. Under this bill’s logic, would health authorities, media channels face criminal charges for initially providing gradual updating information?
Facts update, official guidance changes and early reports are refined as more information emerges gradually. Criminalising or making such laws will challenge the correction and transparency that society needs.
4) ‘THE POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVES’: Smarter Solutions Exist
Rather than take this punitive approach, Karnataka could replace it with a democratic capacity-building exercise:
- Adopt the approach of investing in media literacy programs to equip citizens with the capacity to identify misinformation on their own. For example Finland, which consistently rank at or near the top of resilience to fake news, are pioneering national media literacy programs and have integrated these into schools, teaching students how to assess the information critically online.
- Other democratic alternatives would be mandatory transparency requirements for online platforms; similar to, but less robust thinking than those in the EU Digital Services Act (supporting independent factchecking; and public funding for digital education campaigns).
Each of these alternatives help address underlying issues, the lack of awareness, exposure to the opaque nature of algorithms, and lowering civic trust, while upholding the right to freedom of expression.
5) ‘THE SLIPPERY SLOPE’: Power Without Limits
When we empower the government to define “truth” and punish what it classifies as “lies,” we invite serious risks of governmental overreach. Today’s anti-misinformation law can easily be the next vehicle for the suppression of dissent. In India’s own history there is a cautionary tale, when the country was under Emergency (1975–77), the government exercised near-unlimited powers to censor the media, shut down criticism, and control the public discourse under the “National interest Tag.” More recently, authorities cited Section 66A of the IT Act (held unconstitutional in 2015) to arrest individuals for very banal online posts, even if that law had been declared unconstitutional.
These trends demonstrate, once the powers to control information are granted (in any form), they rarely remain confined to their original purpose, but instead, expand often against the voices that state would find inconvenient.
6) ‘THE STAKEHOLDER IMPACT’: Silencing Society
Civil society organisations are in danger of losing critical space for legitimate advocacy when vague definitions of “misinformation” are used against all manner of routine communication. Journalists also face a situation where they can no longer applaud professional ethics or assure their own personal safety. Citizens will begin to self-censor, worried that one tweet or one blog could trigger arbitrary sanctions. Even academic researchers might be unwilling to pursue critical topics for reasons of personal safety without some level of belief that their multi-million-dollar research agenda is not in conflict with the official narrative. This is a complete chilling effect that threatens the very foundations of an open society.
A bill designed to safeguard democracy could be transformed into a vehicle for dismantling it. Legislation promised to ensure the truth could be applied to criminalise those seeking the truth. A law designed to empower citizens could silence them. When the cure becomes the cause of the disease instead of professing it to protect, we must ask: who is at the benefit zone?
7) ‘THE PATH FORWARD’: A Better Way
Karnataka needs to withdraw this draft bill altogether and begin a transparent and inclusive consultation process:
– Inviting constitutional experts, advocates for digital rights, media experts and technology professionals, making it a complete multistakeholder process.
– Publishing a white paper on constitutional based regulation in a minimum time duration, and
– Doing pilot programs like media literacy and platform transparency measures before coming to a punitive lawmaking
The state still has the opportunity to lead the way in fighting misinformation, but it will need to support solutions that strengthen democratic norms rather than tearing them down.
8) Closing line:
The Karnataka Misinformation and Fake News (Prohibition) Bill, 2025 fails in every dimension
– of its constitutional validity,
– administrative feasibility, and
– democratic integrity.
The harms associated with misinformation are real. There are no shortcuts to building an informed citizenry, certainly not ones paved with suppression, because
जो लोकतंत्र बहस से डरता है, वो पहले ही गलत जानकारी से हार चुका है।
ಜೋ ಪ್ರಜಾಪ್ರಭುತ್ವ ವಾದವಿವಾದದಿಂದ ಭಯಪಡುತ್ತದೆ, ಅದು ಈಗಾಗಲೇ ತಪ್ಪು ಮಾಹಿತಿಗೆ ಸೋತಿದೆ.
A democracy that fears debate is already losing to misinformation.
Thus, Karnataka must choose the path of open, participatory, and rights-respecting information governance, not control in the name of clarity, but clarity through collaboration.