The President of the Republic has been calling for "national action" on new media.
This has been occasioned by an uncomfortable truth: the rise of insults mainly targeted at women, especially the wives of the sitting and past President and past Vice President.
Insults aside, targeting women who happen to be spouses of active politicians, in order to cause public disaffection toward their spouses, is misogynistic, vile and abhorrent.
It is unfortunate that insults, dehumanisation and objectification have become weapons of choice for reducing the image of political opponents in the eyes of the electorate.
What is most disturbing is that male spouses or partners, who are themselves the active politicians, are spared.
Their wives are the ones who face the full brunt of the insults because they are female, and it is generally easier to objectify women, especially because they play active roles in assisting their spouses.
New media is the general term used for social media.
Digital platforms, subsequently created by entrepreneurs for self-publication, connection, etc., have blossomed into a new kind of media platform that provides individuals with global interaction like nothing we have witnessed before.
Information can be disseminated in real time without censorship or restraint of any sort.
Today, with little or no censorship, free speech is free in most countries where there are no state-sponsored restrictions on social media platforms.
For those who use social media as a digital platform, they do not need much permission and are only constrained by themselves.
New media has birthed new career paths and created income streams and jobs that seemed unlikely just a decade ago.
Now, even traditional news outlets are using new media platforms to disseminate their news.
Increasingly, many people get their news and information from new media.
Afrobarometer states that more than 43 per cent of Ghanaian adults get their news from social media.
Over 40 per cent of mainstream journalists attest to the fact that social media has a direct bearing on news disseminated via traditional media channels.
New media is here to stay and appears to get stronger by the day.
This is precisely why any regulation of new media carries such weight: laws written for a platform now used by roughly half the adult population, and increasingly relied on even by traditional newsrooms, do not merely regulate a niche industry, they shape how nearly the whole country informs itself and speaks to power.
Target
Targeting women, especially those who are politicians or politically exposed, to bully, dehumanise and objectify them is regressive.
It is quite disturbing that the focus of these insults is to put the women into disrepute, subject them to ridicule, and diminish their humanity.
There must be a way to curb such excess. But introducing tools that criminalise free speech, censorship or anything similar cannot sit side by side with our growing democracy.
Democracy is about freedom to choose, based on freedom to inform and freedom to be informed.
There is a new bill, the Cybersecurity Amendment Bill, which has several provisions that do not conform to our aspirations as a people who are keen to advance freedom, justice and democracy.
Three of these provisions are as follows: the Cyber Security Authority (CSA), per this new bill, is under section 20(B) being clothed with police-level powers of arrest, search and seizure without judicial warrant.
This infringes the 1992 Constitution in Articles 14, 18(2) and 20.
These provisions protect personal freedom, safeguard against arbitrary arrest, and protect the privacy of property and correspondence.
It also contravenes the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, the African Charter, and the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights).
Additionally sections 67A and 67B of the Cybersecurity Amendment Bill spell out new offences for cyberbullying, online harassment and spreading false information.
These infringe the 1992 Constitution of Ghana in Article 21(1)(a), which guarantees freedom of speech, expression and the press and Article 162, which disallows press censorship.
These provisions also infringe international treaties that Ghana has ratified.
These include the ICCPR, the African Charter, and the African Commission's 2019 Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa, which explicitly criticises criminalising "false news."
Again, the process for determining what constitutes critical information infrastructure in the bill, per its section 35, is opaque.
Critical information infrastructure can be explained as physical and virtual assets, systems and networks whose destruction or disruption would adversely affect a nation's security, economy, or public health and safety.
The CSA, under this section, has broad and opaque powers to infringe on individual freedoms, intellectual property rights, economic rights and human rights, raising many legal challenges.
The Media Foundation for West Africa, the Ghana Journalists Association and Minority in Parliament have raised similar arguments against the bill.
The internet, via new media, has certainly birthed many unsavoury and even harmful claims.
However, in seeking to straighten things out, we cannot put a muzzle on free speech, expression and information.
We could well be on our way to using this regulation as a weapon to quell dissent, increase self-censorship by media houses and journalists, and suppress citizens' ability to express themselves freely.
A democracy is only as good as its strongest critics. In a multiparty democracy, it is the unpaid work of those who are not in government to offer alternative views and vigorously debate government policies and agendas.
Attempts to reduce and diminish dissenting opinions never end well.
Excuse
None of this is to excuse the abuse that prompted the President's call to action.
The women being targeted, and indeed everyone else, deserve real protection under our laws, and that protection should not cause further legal challenges that deter dissent or quell freedom of speech.
As the EU's Digital Services Act shows, that protection can be built around binding obligations on platforms themselves, requiring faster takedown and reporting mechanisms, greater transparency around how harmful content is handled, and accountability enforced by an independent regulator.
We do not need new criminal offences and broad, self-authorised police powers aimed at individual speakers.
Parliament should commit to legislation that addresses this challenge without criminalising free speech or dissent or promoting censorship or self-censorship in any way inconsistent with a free society under a democracy.
We can always learn how other thriving democracies are dealing with this challenge.
There are three changes which would help bring the bill back in line with our constitutional and treaty obligations without abandoning the underlying concern: search, seizure and arrest powers under section 20(B) should require prior judicial authorisation, not CSA self-approval; the cyberbullying and "false information" offences in sections 67A and 67B should be narrowed to match the specificity the African Commission's own standards require, so they cannot be turned against legitimate criticism; and the designation of critical information infrastructure under section 35 should be made transparent and subject to public consultation before it takes effect.
Let us hold our democracy in very high esteem and protect both its women and its critics by fixing this bill, not passing it as written.
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The writer is a Lawyer and Development Professional
