Accountability Is Not Censorship
The rule of law is having a hard time keeping up with the speed of lies. In the digital era, disinformation is not just noise, it is a tool. It can delegitimize courts, discredit investigators, and turn routine legal steps into proof of a conspiracy. When that happens at scale, the target is not a policy, it is the idea that disputes should be settled through institutions rather than through pressure and street power. Social platforms are not neutral in this. Their systems reward attention, and attention often follows anger, fear, and certainty. That is why propaganda now looks less like a government poster and more like a constant stream of clips, captions, and insinuations.
The Southport case in the United Kingdom in late July 2024 showed how quickly this can spill into real life. Three girls were killed at a dance class, and within hours, false claims spread online about the suspect being an asylum seeker and being linked to Islam. Reports described how these narratives fed violence, including attacks on a mosque and clashes with police, before authorities confirmed the suspect was UK-born. Later assessments argued that confusion and gaps in official communication helped the rumour market thrive, while disorder spread across multiple places and mass arrests followed. Amnesty also pointed to how X’s design choices and influencer amplification can accelerate such false narratives.
The point is not that people should be silent in a crisis. The point is that when platforms and powerful accounts push unverified claims as fact, they can ignite collective punishment
That same logic applies to politically charged influence campaigns elsewhere, including Pakistan, where competing narratives about legitimacy, elections, and accountability have been running hot since 2022. A common pattern is familiar: a claim appears on X, YouTube channels dramatize it, then large account networks repeat it until it feels confirmed. The content is often framed as urgent and secret, with accusations against named judges, officers, or investigators. This is where propaganda becomes a direct attack on the rule of law. Once a population is trained to believe that courts are only instruments of enemies, any verdict becomes invalid. The legal record stops mattering. All that matters is which story feels emotionally satisfying.
This is why the free speech argument gets misused. Free expression protects criticism, satire, and tough political speech, but it does not create a license to defame people or to incite violence. Every serious legal system draws lines, even if the lines vary. In early January 2026, an anti-terrorism court in Islamabad sentenced several journalists, YouTubers, and former military officers to life imprisonment over charges tied to inciting violence and spreading hatred against state institutions during the May 2023 unrest, with reporting noting that several were convicted in absentia. You can debate whether the prosecutions were fair, whether the evidence met the standard, and whether trials in absentia should be used. Those are real questions. But it is misleading to insist that any legal boundary on incitement is automatically authoritarian.
If a person repeatedly urges defiance and violence or fabricates criminal claims against named people while knowing they cannot prove them, states do not lose the right to respond just because the speech is political
The UK defamation ruling against Adil Farooq Raja is a useful reality check for audiences who treat the phrase free speech as a magic shield. Reporting in December 2025 described a High Court decision finding his allegations defamatory, alongside court-ordered damages and costs, with legal commentary summarizing an award of fifty thousand pounds in damages. You do not have to like the plaintiff or the politics to accept the principle. If you publish serious factual allegations about a named person, you either prove them or you face consequences. That is not censorship. That is accountability for asserted facts.
The platform incentive problem makes this worse. YouTube is not a newspaper with an editor and a corrections culture. It is a distribution and monetization machine. Content that triggers rage travels, and rage converts into views, donations, and subscriptions. That creates a perverse market where instability becomes profitable. A creator can frame every court summons as tyranny, every police action as proof of dictatorship, and every lack of evidence as evidence of a cover-up. If that creator is overseas, they can also market distance as credibility, while being less exposed to immediate legal risk.
The result is an economy of agitation, where the rule of law is treated as a villain because it threatens engagement and income
So, what does a serious rule of law response look like, without drifting into repression? It starts with precision. States should focus on provable harms: incitement tied to violence, defamation with named targets, threats, harassment, and organized campaigns that knowingly spread false claims presented as fact. At the same time, the state should protect critical speech, including protest speech, investigative reporting, and satire. Procedures matter. Evidence disclosure matters. Appeals matter. If the state is confident, it should welcome scrutiny of its cases and show its work in court. When governments rely on vague charges or punish broad categories of dissent, they feed the propaganda they claim to oppose.
Platforms also have obligations. They can reduce algorithmic amplification of accounts that repeatedly spread demonstrably false claims during breaking events, and they can label or slow virality while facts are emerging. The Southport aftermath showed that information vacuums get filled fast, and once filled, they are hard to empty. A rights-respecting approach is not mass deletion of political content. It is targeted friction, transparency about reach, and clear enforcement against harassment and incitement.
Disinformation and digital propaganda thrive when trust is already weak. The rule of law cannot fix that alone, but it can stop making it worse. The choice is not between chaos and censorship. The real choice is whether societies defend a basic line: facts must be tested, accusations must be proved, and political disputes must not be settled by viral lies that invite violence.
