You capture an image of a Myna bird perched on your window sill and immediately post it on your social media account with the caption “One for bad luck”. Careful. Sharing this superstition online could land you in prison for up to seven years under the Karnataka Misinformation and Fake News (Prohibition) Bill 2025.
Time and again, the Indian government takes up the task of regulating the menace of misinformation, which includes any information that is incorrect, and in most cases spread without the intention to deceive. By no stretch of imagination is this easy, but most policy interventions have focused on requiring social media intermediaries to restrict the sharing of false and/or superstitious content.
The Karnataka government now proposes to criminalise such false speech and create a parallel regime to central laws for the targeted blocking of online content. The bill will be sent to various departments for consultations before being presented before the state cabinet. In this piece, we will delve into the structural and enforcement infirmities of the bill.
Structural infirmities
The bill attempts to distinguish between ‘fake news’ and ‘misinformation’ and assigns penalties that range from five years for misinformation to seven years for fake news. It claims to differentiate between these two types of false speech, but the definitions reveal no difference as each describes speech that can influence the public through false or exaggerated information.
Determining intent is a challenge when scrutinising online false speech. Legal scholars have repeatedly warned against using catch-all phrases like ‘fake news’ to describe any form of false speech, as this term is often used by politicians to delegitimise criticism levied at them in modern-day public squares. And it also remains too vague to accurately define under law. Social media users may end up being penalised for honest mistakes and trivialities and social media companies may themselves over-censor to avoid penalties.
The bill criminalises speech that is factually incorrect and imposes unusually harsh penalties. Spreading fake news could get you the same prison time as that for kidnapping.
Communication of misinformation to any user within Karnataka is prohibited under the bill. But geo-fencing online speech is technologically hard. Digital natives can easily circumvent detection using virtual private networks (VPNs) for instance, evading accurate geolocation via proxy servers distributed globally. This sets the stage for a digital cat-and-mouse game, with the Karnataka police chasing anonymous users across a geographically unbound internet.
Also read: Internet can’t be regulated like TV. Look at how UK, Australia are doing it
Enforcement concerns
The definition of ‘communication’ in the bill is wide enough to capture any other forms of communication, possibly extending to in-person communications, which is excessive. A prohibition on communication of misinformation also raises concerns about applicability to past communications or to situations where the recipient moves into the state post communication. Instances where the sender has no knowledge of the receiver’s location will make compliance impossible.
The bill also provides for a six-member social media regulatory authority to enforce provisions related to fake news under the proposed law. But the authority’s enforcement powers stand on shaky ground. For instance, the authority has the power to trigger punitive action under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS), yet ‘fake news’ as defined in the bill does not map onto any specific offence in the BNS.
The authority’s powers are confined to fake news, excluding misinformation, despite the significant conceptual overlap between the two. Penalties for misinformation can be enforced through a standard legal process of filing a First Information Report (FIR) and finally adjudication by a court, all without the involvement of the authority. This framework makes the identification of illegal content difficult in instances like when a piece of content qualifies both as fake news and misinformation. How will the authority keep itself from adjudicating on aspects of the content that is misinformation?
The regulatory authority is also given a sweeping mandate to police a wide range of speech based on subjective standards. For instance, the authority is to monitor and pre-emptively block content deemed disrespectful to Sanatan Dharma, and which promotes superstition or is unscientific in nature. Imagine the enforcement burden on the six-member body to apply these standards to a deluge of complaints, especially given the speed of content circulation.
Beyond its many conceptual issues, the drafting of the bill is inelegant in multiple places with key terms left undefined, scope of penalties unclear, and vague obligations for social media companies. Such drafting, in a legislation with criminal penalties, is unfortunately common in both central and state laws and complicates both compliance and enforcement efforts. The design challenges with the proposed law do not end at definitional and structural inconsistencies, but also extend to constitutional and philosophical problems which we will explore in the subsequent article.
The authors work at Koan Advisory Group, a technology policy consulting firm. Views are personal.
This article is part of ThePrint-Koan Advisory series that analyses emerging policies, laws and regulations in India’s technology sector. Read all the articles here.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)